U.S.
Military Targets Southeast Colorado
Part
2
By
Deanna Spingola
Between
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. 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 HYPERLINK
"http://www.pinoncanyon.com/images/draft_map_full.jpg"
map
or this HYPERLINK "http://www.pinoncanyon.com/images/ljtd_enhncd_map.jpg"
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.
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.
Given these desperate circumstances, “between 2000 and 2004, 19 percent of
Colorado farm and ranch deaths were reported as suicides.”
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). 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 HYPERLINK "http://www.realityzone.com/hiddenagenda2.html"
Norman
Dodd
as research director. Almost immediately, instructions from a complicit “White
House” to “kill the committee” ended all inquiries.
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.”
In
The Law, Bastiat stated: “Life, faculties, production — in other words,
individuality, liberty, property — this is man.” “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.”
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.
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 HYPERLINK "http://www.businessroundtable.org/index.aspx"
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.
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.
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. Public
Relations firms continue to influence public opinion according to who purchases
their unique services.
Booz,
Allen, & Hamilton, Inc. (hereafter Booz Allen), 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.” 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) HYPERLINK "http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm"
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). 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.
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.
Since 1979, Excel Corporation has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cargill,
infamous for animal abuse.
Many
meatpacking plants have returned to the exploitative, dangerous conditions
described in Upton Sinclair’s HYPERLINK "http://www.online-literature.com/upton_sinclair/jungle/"
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.” 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.”
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.
Non-enforcement of immigration laws allowed IBP and other corporations to
“import” cheap labor. The Basic Pilot program, now complete with HYPERLINK
"http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/241182_hiring19.html?source=rss"
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.
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 Hudson,” bought the beef
operation. 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. A Smithfield purchase
would have encountered more “regulatory delays” than the Tyson deal.
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. 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. 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.
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.
Fast
Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper
Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
The
Law, the Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, pg. 8
Foundations:
Their Power and Influence by René A. Wormser, 1958, Devin-Adair, New
York, pg. 51
Ibid,
Appendix B, pgs. 328-383
Activist
Federal Employees Combine To Systematically Cripple Rural Economies,
A Report By
The
Center For The Defense Of Free Enterprise
The
Law, the Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, pg. 1
Ibid,
pg. 6
Fast
Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper
Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
When
Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press, Inc., 1996,
pp. 141-148
Ibid
Ibid
Fast
Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, Harper
Perennial, 2002, pp. 133-147
