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U.S. Military Targets
Southeast ColoradoPart 2 of 3
Sunday, May 18, 2008
By Deanna Spingola
NewsWithViews.comBetween 1980 and 2000, Colorado lost 1.5 million acres of ranchland. The 1960s per-acre price went from “less than $200” to thousands per acre.[1] Land doesn’t spontaneously increase in value but is a function of calculated inflation (the hidden tax) – driven by sudden surpluses of Federal Reserve Notes that decrease the value of currency already in circulation while escalating all prices.
Evidenced by the acreage figures cited in part one of this multi-part article, the Pentagon does not “need” more land. The army’s proposed expansion would give them a total of 2, 577,304 acres (thousand square miles), just at the Piñon Canyon Manuever Site, as shown on the map or this map. The federal government owns more than 5.1 million acres classified as “vacant.” U.S. land dedicated to military purposes equals 2.4 percent. U.S. land owned by the federal government, as of September 30, 2004, is 653,299,090.2 acres or 28.8 percent of the country. Most of Nevada, 84.5 percent, is owned by the federal government.[2]
Obviously, land is not the issue. It is however, a huge issue to the ranchers and is fundamental to their livelihood. If their land is seized, ranchers cannot pack up their cows and move elsewhere. Ranchers still become emotional when they reflect on the first and supposedly the last time that the army “took” their property, lands that had belonged to families for generations. Courts have distorted the law, and have become “instruments of plunder,” seizing land from the citizens they have pledged to protect.[3] Given these desperate circumstances, “between 2000 and 2004, 19 percent of Colorado farm and ranch deaths were reported as suicides.”[4]
The army’s Colorado land grab, a scheme to cleanse the area, is merely the tip of the globalist iceberg which concerns, not only ranchers, but the entire middle class. The army, literally acting against American citizens, is not alone but merely the first offense – the patriotism ploy! Others are involved – smug, obedient bureaucrats, environmentalists and tax-exempt foundations.
Investigative Congressional committees attempted to halt the powerful influence exerted by private foundations (4,162 of them in 1951).[5] Foundations have no voters, no clientele, and no investors. They enable the elite to reshape civilization using billions of tax-exempt dollars. Congressman Cox’s investigation, starting in 1952, failed as most of the witnesses were “officers and trustees of large foundations” and their associates. Cox unexpectedly fell “gravely ill during the investigation and died before a report could be filed.” The Reece Committee, facing obstacle after obstacle, resumed the investigation with Norman Dodd as research director. Almost immediately, instructions from a complicit “White House” to “kill the committee” ended all inquiries.[6]
In June 1998, Ron Arnold, then executive vice-president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise gave congressional testimony that resulted in a detailed report entitled Battered Communities, followed up by a comprehensively-researched book – Undue Influence. Arnold confirmed “Rural communities are suffering unprecedented social and economic losses. All segments of natural resource goods production – water development, farming, ranching, mining, petroleum, timber, fishing, transportation, and manufacturing projects – are being systematically attacked, thwarted, and eradicated. Natural resource production and related jobs are being forced offshore.”[7]
In The Law, Bastiat stated: “Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man.”[8] “Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.”[9] In addition to land-seizure concerns, ranchers are at the mercy of huge monopolies which control the market and manipulate cattle prices without the expense of owning production. They sometimes finance a few “large feedlot owners who lease ranches and run cattle for them,” a way of controlling prices through “captive supply.” Independent ranchers, with ever-increasing overhead, get less and less of every retail dollar. Justifiable resistance to this corporatism could result in retaliation and economic ruin, an object lesson to silence other ranchers.[10]
Price fixing and profit manipulation, as John D. Rockefeller discovered, was best achieved by refining and selling oil rather than extracting it from the ground. Skilled carpenters, factory workers, ranchers, farmers, and meatpacking workers labor for decreasing returns while monopoly capitalists, comfortable in luxurious boardrooms, control markets to enhance their personal fortunes without loyalties or consideration for America’s economy. Consider construction – individuals cut lumber, assemble fixtures, pour cement, install a roof, paint and together build a house. Who benefits the most? Not the producers – rather the fractional-reserve banker who extorts usury on a paper-only loan.
Congressional leaders, financial benefactors of corporatism, broke up the Chicago-based beef trust (Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Swift and Wilson) through the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 – an example of Hegelian Dialectics. Create a crisis and then fix it with pre-determined government regulations that typically only burdens small business firms. Reasonable competition existed until Reagan’s Administration.
In 1972, a 200 member Business Roundtable, through the merging of the March Group, the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable and the Labor Law Study Committee, was established. The group was comprised of the heads of major industrial corporations, commercial banks, insurance companies, the largest retailers, and the biggest transportation and utility companies. This forum of corporations dismissed their “competitive differences” to arrive at a “consensus on issues of social and economic policy for America.” Members of this elite group rejected national interests in favor of the prospective profits of economic globalization. Members organized “aggressive campaigns” to gain political support for their agenda. They enrolled 2,300 U.S. corporations in their newly-created front organization, USA*NAFTA. They furtively promoted the trade agreement despite widespread opposition.[11]
The Roundtable “bombarded Americans” with assurances, editorials, news releases, editorials and radio and television commentaries claiming that NAFTA would prove beneficial, stop Mexican immigration, provide high-paying jobs and raise environmental standards. “Roundtable members enjoyed privileged access to the NAFTA negotiation process through representation on advisory committees to the U.S. trade representative.” NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994. However, during the prior twelve years, nine Roundtable corporations had already outsourced about 180,000 jobs to Mexico.[12]
Public Relations firms produced “facts,” opinion pieces, expert analyses, and managed public polls, telephone solicitation, direct mail, and created “citizen” advocacy groups and “public-image-building campaigns for their corporate clients. One firm, Burson Marsteller, enjoyed net billings in 1992 of $204 million. “The top fifty public relations firms billed over $1.7 billion in 1991.” Public relations employees, who outnumber news reporters, manipulate the news “to serve the interests of paying clients.” By 1990, almost 40 percent of the news originated from public-relations press releases.[13] Public Relations firms continue to influence public opinion according to who purchases their unique services.
Booz, Allen, & Hamilton, Inc. (hereafter Booz Allen),[14] a public relations firm has been paid $500,000 a year for their Piñon Canyon “expansion planning” including managing invitation- only meetings with southern Colorado residents. Booz Allen, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, has clients such as the Air Force, Federal Transit Administration, Labor Department, the Navy and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ex-CIA director and Rhodes Scholar, James Woolsey, became Vice President of Booz Allen on July 15th, 2002.”[15] He served as counsel for major corporations in both commercial arbitrations and the negotiation of joint ventures and other agreements. Woolsey is one of the signers of the January 26, 1998 Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter to Clinton urging military action against Iraq. Dov S. Zakheim (CFR), Pentagon Comptroller from May 4, 2001 to March 10, 2004 also became a vice president at Booz Allen on May 6, 2004. This was after he was unable to explain the loss of $1 trillion dollars at the Pentagon (in addition to the $2.3 trillion on September 10, 2001).[16][17]PNAC, promoters of American imperialism and “Full-spectrum” dominance, is funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.
The expanding cozy relationship, known as “contract bureaucracy,” between the federal government and Booz Allen began with the Nixon administration. In 1969 Donald Rumsfeld was appointed as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity with Dick Cheney as his assistant. Rumsfeld brought in Booz Allen to reorganize the agency. The government uses contractors for policy advice and management services, a taxpayer-supported, multibillion-dollar giveaway to private management consultants, experts and think tanks.[18]
Reagan, and his globalist handler/vice president G. H. W. Bush, ignored anti-trust legislation and allowed corporate mergers to devour smaller firms. In 1970, the top four meatpacking firms slaughtered about 21% of the nation’s beef. By 2000, ConAgra, Iowa Beef Processors (IBP, nation’s largest red meat producer), Excel Corporation and National Beef (fourth largest processor) slaughtered about 84% of the nation’s cattle and consequently controlled prices.[19] Since 1979, Excel Corporation has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cargill, infamous for animal abuse.[20]
Many meatpacking plants have returned to the exploitative, dangerous conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Wages, once protected by organized labor, have plummeted. By 1983, worker’s wages “fell below the average U.S. manufacturing wage” and had further declined by 25 percent in 2002. Immigrants, willing to work for less, have replaced many middle class laborers. Rather than outsourcing labor to Third World countries, the meat and poultry industries are importing Third World laborers and “reproducing developing country employment conditions here.”[21] Transnational corporations enhance their profits by exploiting labor and sales elsewhere. Earlier this year, Tyson Foods announced that they were “forming a joint venture with Jiangsu Jinghai Poultry Industry Group Co. Ltd., to raise, process and sell chickens in east China under the Tyson brand name. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Tyson will own 70 percent of the venture.”[22]
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush authorized an eligibility verification pilot program for foreign laborers with nine participating companies. Clinton expanded this program in 1995 to the “Basic Pilot” program with 1,000 employers.[23] Non-enforcement of immigration laws allowed IBP and other corporations to “import” cheap labor. The Basic Pilot program, now complete with federal database, was “designed to help big employers of foreign labor.” Additionally, Clinton’s “Bosnian refugee resettlement efforts” supplied 6,000 refugees to IBP in Waterloo, Iowa. A total of 80,000 Balkan refugees settled in the Midwest. Bombing foreign countries to smithereens evidently provides cheap labor to corporate America.[24]
Tyson Foods targeted competitor, Hudson Foods, but Hudson wasn’t serious about selling until Clinton’s Department of Agriculture swat team descended on Hudson Foods with a beef recall (August 12, 1997). The USDA illegally closed a plant and destroyed their business. Then Tyson Foods, a huge Clinton contributor, purchased Hudson’s chicken operation at a fire-sale price. “Tyson's buyout bid” was an offer Hudson couldn't refuse. That purchase complemented “Tyson's distribution and production system.” IBP, “a major supplier to the Hudson,” bought the beef operation.[25] By 2001, Tyson, the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork combined, won the bidding war against Smithfield, to purchase IBP, the nation’s largest beef producer.[26] A Smithfield purchase would have encountered more “regulatory delays” than the Tyson deal.[27]
John Munsell, a small businessman and agricultural whistle-blower, discovered E.coli in an order of ConAgra hamburger and informed the USDA which had an “aggressive see-no-evil, non-interference policy” with powerful agribusiness corporations who prefer and lobby for self-regulation. Rather than investigating ConAgra, the USDA shut down Munsell’s operation for four months and investigated his business.[28] The beef, 19 million pounds, was recalled in July 2002. In September 2002, ConAgra began transferring their meatpacking operation to HM Capital Partners LLC, a Dallas-based private (corporate raider) equity firm owned by Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst, and Booth Creek Management Corporation becoming the second largest processor of beef and pork in the world. The deal was completed in 2004; the resulting joint venture was called Swift & Company. Then in July 2007, Swift & Company was purchased by JBS, S.A., the acronym of the founder, José Batista Sobrinho. J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. brokered the massive transaction.[29] JBS is acquiring National Beef Packing and Smithfield Foods’ – No. 3 and 4 of the five largest beef companies in the United States. JBS will then control 10 percent of the world’s beef supplies with only two major U.S. competitors – Tyson and Cargill.[30]
Beef trade, by JBS Swift & Company, to South Korea will resume in May 2008 after a four-year ban due to the 2003 mad-cow scare which closed most Asian doors to U.S. beef. JBS intends to penetrate global markets anywhere they can – Asia, Russia and elsewhere.[31] For part one click below.
Click here for part -----> 1, 3
Footnotes:
1, Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
2, Federal Land and Buildings Ownership, Updated: May 19, 2005
3, The Law, the Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, pg. 8
4, Colorado State Program Receives $800,000 To Assist Farmers And Ranchers With Disabilities, September 5, 2006
5, Foundations: Their Power and Influence by René A. Wormser, 1958, Devin-Adair, New York, pg. 51
6, Ibid, Appendix B, pgs. 328-383
7, Battered Communities, How Wealthy Private Foundations, Grant-Driven Environmental Groups, And Activist Federal Employees Combine To Systematically Cripple Rural Economies, A Report By The Center For The Defense Of Free Enterprise
8, The Law, the Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, pg. 1
9, Ibid, pg. 6
10, Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
11, When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press, Inc., 1996, pp. 141-148
12, Ibid
13, Ibid
14, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Privatizing Combat, the New World Order By Laura Peterson, October 28, 2002
15, The Real Saudi Ties are U.S. Ties
16, Following Zakheim and Pentagon Trillions to Israel and 9-11 by Jerry Mazza, July 31, 2006
17, Political Research Associates, Dov Zakheim
18, Shadowboxer by Jason Peckenpaugh, 11/15/03 who was quoting The Shadow Government by Dan Guttman and Barry Wilner, 1976
19, Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
20, More Slaughterhouses Cited For Abuse, CBS News, April 30, 2008
21, Blood, Sweat and Fear, Historical Background
22, Tyson to open chicken processing plant in China by Bloomberg AP and Staff Reports, 2/2/2008
23, The Impact of Employment Verification, September 12, 2006, Statement of John M. Keeley, Center for Immigration Studies
24, Tyson Foods Victorious in IBP Bidding War Now Nation's No.1 Beef, Poultry Processor, Agribusiness Examiner N.101, January 11, 2001
25, The President's Favors to Tyson and IBP: Consolidation, Perks and Cheap Labor
26, Ibid
27, Tyson Foods Victorious in IBP Bidding War Now Nation's No.1 Beef, Poultry Processor, Agribusiness Examiner N.101, January 11, 2001
28, Working Paper for the UNIS-UN Student Conference
29, JBS S.A. Completes Acquisition of Swift & Company, IN Food Service, July 12, 2007
30, To Justice Dept: Brazil beef packer would harm U.S. by North Platte Bulletin Staff - 3/25/2008
31, JBS Swift hopes to move in as South Korea opens doors to U.S. beef by Sharon Dunn, April 19, 2008, The Tribune
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