At first, I thought this was a spoof. It sounds like something out of a Peter Sellers or John Candy comedy or something out of The Onion: United States Invades Costa Rica. After all, no mainstream media outlet has covered this story since it broke on July 3rd. And if our corporate mainstream media haven't covered it, then it never happened.
But, no. About a week and a half ago, the Costa Rican government actually invited us to invade and occupy their country to do battle with drug traffickers. So President Obama, despite being stretched paper-thin in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and where ever else he's sent us, said, "OK."
We now have, I shit you not, 46 US naval warships and 7000 Marines off Costa Rica. Yeah, this is a booty call, alright, but not necessarily the kind of Costa Rican booty depicted in the lead picture.
OK, on three: Slap both sides of your face Macauley Culkin-style with both hands in mock alarm when I tell you we're really there for... oil. And we're not just advocating for any oil company but George W. Bush's old employer, Harken Energy.
You all remember Harken Energy, don't you? Sure you do, or you should. That was the third energy company that inexplicably hired George W. Bush, installed him on their board of directors despite having pulled an Exxon Valdez on two other oil companies (Arbusto and Spectrum 7) before getting rescued by Daddy's wealthy buddies time after time. Bush then refused to file stock disclosure forms with the SEC in time and committed insider trading to enrich himself to the tune of over $600,000 by selling off his own stock holdings, money that provided him with the venture capital to buy himself into a minor ownership with the Texas Rangers organization.
So, are we up to speed, boys and girls? Good. Because it gets better. A lot better.
You probably don't remember that Harken Energy wanted to drill for oil off Costa Rica's shore before the Costa Rican government told them to go Cheney themselves. Undeterred, Harken then sued Costa Rica for $57,000,000,000 before being told once again to go Cheney themselves by a high Costa Rican court (Since, once again, no MSM outlet ever covered the lawsuit or bothered to archive it, I can't link to one to validate this fact but it is a matter of public record).
While masquerading as the 43rd president, Bush even went to Costa Rica with the intention of pimping for Harken Energy and to ask the government to reconsider. "No way, Jorge, now get the fuck out", they told him. Still undeterred, the World Bank then got involved and set up a panel composed entirely of corporate attorneys to decide any retroactive merit to Harken's claim.
Costa Rica essentially gave up their sovereignty with the American-generated CAFTA agreement under Bush so essentially their country's leaders inviting us to invade their country (which has a Coast Guard but no army, by the way, further making the necessity of almost 50 warships and 7000 Marines all the more inexplicable) is virtually a formality. What CAFTA essentially does, and we've seen this with other oil companies in Ecuador and elsewhere, is give oil companies and other corporations the right to take the local City Hall to court for lost revenue but on a national scale, when the peasants rebel and tell them no.
Usually, they win since they have the legal firepower, the people get poorer, the nation's natural resources get sucked dry and the local ecosystem gets fucked up while the indigenous peasants die of cancer and other oil-related diseases while oil companies like Chevron get to plausibly deny they had anything to do with abnormally spiking mortality rates and incidents of cancer.
Now Obama wants to do the same thing to Costa Rica only under the guise of "fighting drug trafficking." Uh huh. And, uh, you know, while we're in the neighborhood...
Venezuela also happens to be in Costa Rica's neighborhood. That's the country led by that evil commie Hugo Chavez that sells Citgo gas here in the States and was just a few weeks ago praised by the United Nations for actually fighting drug trafficking.
Chavez has been reviled by both the Bush and Obama administrations for threatening US oil companies with talk of nationalizing Venezuela's oil industry. Let's take a short trip down Memory Lane, shall we, and take stock of other nations we'd invaded and whose governments we'd smashed after they nationalized their oil industry:
Iran in 1953.
Iraq in 2003.
Hmm.
Now, it could be suggested that if we were serious about winning the war on drugs, we could send those same warships to Mexico or Colombia, where the shit comes from. But that would mean actually putting the real drug lords and not just their drug mules in Costa Rica behind bars and who knows how many US politicians they have in their pockets.
But invading and occupying Costa Rica a la Grenada makes perfect sense when you superimpose a Bush-era template over this and realize that Costa Rica has no military to speak of and that their cash-strapped politicians and our cash-bloated politicians are on the same oil-spattered page. And Costa Rica's government doesn't give a fuck if Harken pulls a BP and turns their pristine white beaches and the lungs of the natives black. Obama doesn't give a fuck if he weakens national security by dispatching a huge chunk of our navy and the Marine Corps to a nation that has no army. And the Grand Oleaginous Party won't call Obama on weakening our national security because he's protecting the free market system that has made a wasteland of our country, Central America and South America.
