I’m late to this discussion, but it is something I have been reading a lot about as a part owner of several small farms in Ghana, one of many countries where Monsanto is trying to push GMOs. Here is a fairly concise description of what Monsanto is doing:

At a biotech industry conference in January 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. First, his team asked Monsanto executives what their ideal future looked like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson consultants then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct. (Jeffrey M. Smith)

and

Monsanto’s public relations story about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are largely based on five concepts.

1. GMOs are needed to feed the world.
2. GMOs have been thoroughly tested and proven safe.
3. GMOs increase yield.
4. GMOs reduce the use of agricultural chemicals.
5. GMOs can be contained, and therefore coexist with non-GM crops.

All five are pure myths — blatant falsehoods about the nature and benefit of this infant technology.

Be careful about arming bassets if you find yourself so inclined. You may not have seen this story:

Adorable dog shoots French hunter

Regretfully, I think you may be right.
(and, of course I meant money rather than moony)

Superb Infographic on how LIBOR manipulation takes moony from your pocket and mine.
http://www.accountingdegree.net/numbers/libor.php

Mahmood Mamdani tells us:

… peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mahmood-mamdani/the-politics-of-naming-genocide-civil-war-insurgency

And I came across this today which seems relevant to any discussion of humanitarianism and imperialism here in the US.

“Given that bankers, corporate lawyers and top corporate executives hold key positions in the US state and given that they fund and contribute to elite policy formulation organizations, it can be concluded that the point of US primacy is to secure the financial and corporate class’s profit-making interests. These include: creation of conditions for low-wage labor; the elimination of infant-industry protections; bans on subsidized pricing of necessities; upward redistribution of income; privatization of heath care and education; weakening environmental and health and safety regulations; and so on; in other words, all that is necessary to make profits fatter, and at the same time, all that makes the lives of ordinary people—in Iran and the West–meaner, poorer, shorter, and more uncertain.”

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/the-uss-barbarous-policy-on-iran/

Too right!

As to

The Administration relishes the thought of instituting a drone program in Somalia because they would have no government to deal with in approving it.

The US has been using Somalia for drone target practice from at least as early as October 9, 2011 up until Dec 2, 2011. Somali lives have been wasted in a grotesque experiment. During that period there were almost daily strikes, with two or three strikes per day some days, all of them killing and injuring people. PruningShears recorded the links to the reports on PressTV, and I filled in more detail
here.

There have been no strikes on Somalia recorded since Dec. 2, about the time the Iranians announced their capture of a US drone on December 4. But I suspect the strikes will resume. It is too easy to kill Somalis this way, with no one to complain, and no consequences except to Somalis. It is an opportunity the drone warriors cannot pass up.

Additionally, people have been promised a career path in drone warfare:

CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs

… In 2005, the agency had created a career track in targeting for the drone programme for analysts in the intelligence directorate, the Sep. 2 Post article revealed.

That decision meant that analysts who chose to specialise in targeting for CIA drone operations were promised that they could stay within that specialty and get promotions throughout their careers. Thus the agency had made far-reaching commitments to its own staff in the expectation that the drone war would grow far beyond the three strikes a year and that it would continue indefinitely.

By 2007, the agency realised that, in order to keep those commitments, it had to get the White House to change the rules by relaxing existing restrictions on drone strikes.

Apart from the drones, there is also the arrest of 12 CIA spies in Iran:
Iran delivers major blow to the CIA

Iran’s claim last week to have arrested 12 spies working for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is potentially a major blow to American intelligence-gathering efforts in Iran and to American intelligence generally. The arrests come on the heels of the arrest of 30 alleged CIA spies in late May and are indicative of steadily improving counter-intelligence capabilities.

The recent success is reinforced by the unraveling of a CIA spy ring in Lebanon operating within the Hezbollah organization. These reports have been grudgingly confirmed by current and former US intelligence officials, which is suggestive of a major American intelligence defeat, if not a full-blown disaster.

Here is a bit more about Katehi’s more recent role in Greece, from Mark Ames:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-how-uc-davis-chancellor-linda-katehi-brought-oppression-back-to-greece%e2%80%99s-universities.html

… as soon as the junta was overthrown and democracy restored in 1974, Greece immediately banned the presence of army, police or state security forces on university campuses. This so-called “university asylum” law turned Greece’s university campuses into cop-free zones of “political asylum,” where no one could interfere in the students’ rights to dissent against the government.
…
Earlier this year, Linda Katehi served on an “International Committee On Higher Education In Greece,” along with a handful of American, European and Asian academics. The ostensible goal was to “reform” Greece’s university system. The real problem, from the real powers behind the scenes (banksters and the EU), was how to get Greece under control as the austerity-screws tightened. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that squeezing more money from Greece’s beleaguered citizens would mean clamping down on Greece’s democracy and doing something about those pesky Greek university students. And that meant taking away the universities’ “amnesty” protection, in place for nearly four decades, so that no one, nowhere, would be safe from police truncheons, gas, or bullets.

Thanks to the EU, bankers, and UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, university freedom for Greece’s students has taken a huge, dark step backwards.

Here you can read a translation of the report co-authored by UC Davis’ Linda Katehi–the report which brought about the end of Greece’s “university asylum” law.What’s particularly disturbing is that Linda Katehi was the only Greek on that commission. Presumably that would give her a certain amount of extra sway–both because of her inside knowledge, and because of her moral authority among the other non-Greek committee members. And yet, Linda Katehi signed off on a report that provided the rationale for repealing Greece’s long-standing “university asylum” law. She basically helped undo the very heart and soul of Greece’s pro-democracy uprising against the junta.

Many thanks for your work and all the coverage.

It appears Katehi is no beginner when it comes to fascism. Here is a comment and link I came across:

One wonders if Chancellor Katehi will see to it that this law is enforced against the criminals in her campus gestapo corps.

Katehi is originally Greek and has seen to it (not alone, that would be unfair) that the zones protected from military intervention in Higher Ed. Institutions in Greece (instituted after massacres not long ago, 1973) was junked.

see for ex. via *naked capitalism*, by the Mark Ames:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-how-uc-davis-chancellor-linda-katehi-brought-oppression-back-to-greece’

Wiki states she was there (?):

She was present at the military crackdown against protesting students that occurred at that university on November 17, 1973.

Posted by: Noirette | Nov 23, 2011 10:59:05 AM | 15

The world would be a far better place without Kony and the atrocities he has committed. Unfortunately Uganda’s UPDF is guilty of many similar atrocities:

Since 1986, Museveni’s army has been known to commit some of the worst atrocities on the ethnic Acholi people who occupy the regions of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader. The UPDF, also formerly known as the National Resistance Army (NRA) became infamous for burning civilians alive in huts, killings, and the rapes of both women and men in what the Acholi called tek gungu. Tek Gungu referred to rape of men and women by Museveni’s soldiers who would force a man or woman to kneel down (gungu) before the rape is committed against the male or female victim. These rape incidents have been documented by Human Rights Watch and yet remain ignored by most so-called mainstream media. Museveni, despite his army’s atrocities remains a Western “darling.”
from: http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/1917.cfm

The UPDF has been an active participant leading atrocities in the DRC in the greed for mineral wealth. This is well documented including in a UN report.

The UPDF has recently been asked to leave both the CAR and the DRC, from Uganda journalist Rosebell Kagumire’s blog:

The CAR government in December 2010 had asked the UPDF to leave but they are still present in one area. A friend who works in CAR once told me that when they were asking CAR civilians which militia groups are involved in the conflict, some wrote UPDF. This is because the ordinary people on the ground just see people in UPDF uniforms and have no clue who they are and what they are there to do.

The DRC government asked UPDF to leave, at first by May this year but later asked for a calendar showing their withdrawal. I have not heard of the details of this withdraw plan. In some incidents the Congolese Army, which has its own structural problems had clashes with UPDF in DRC which were largely unreported in the media.

The UPDF are the forces the US is partnering with, training, equipping, supporting etc, who are supposed to go after Kony. The US already tried this once with the UPDF at the end of 2008, see: http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/stability-operations-cause-900-civilian-deaths-100000-displaced-miss-target/.
The killing and displacement continued for months after that account was written. Over 1000 people were butchered, and well over 100,000 were displaced.

US forces have been active in Uganda for several years as part of AFRICOM. They are already there. The question is, will anything positive and successful be done to stop the LRA? Evidence to date is not promising. It is far more likely the body count will just grow.

Kony and the Lords Resistance Army have been operating in northern Uganda for more than 20 years, starting around 1987. The US knew about them but did not regard it as a US problem. In some respects Museveni used their presence to his political advantage. Then huge amounts of oil were discovered in Uganda along Lake Albert, and much more is expected to be found there and in the DRC in the great lakes region. The LRA are in the way.

The LRA does the work of nightmares, they are unbelievably brutal and don’t appear to have a political agenda. There is nothing redeeming one can say about them.

In late December 2008, in what was supposed to be an outgoing triumph for Bush, the US trained sponsored, supplied arms and paid for fuel for a raid against the LRA. It failed, but the LRA went through neighboring villages and countryside butchering and kidnapping, causing the deaths of more than 1000 civilians and the displacement of more than a million civilians. In one village they murdered the entire population as they were preparing celebrations on Christmas eve, then sat among the corpses and ate the prepared feast. The LRA had been somewhat quiet and contained before that. They have continued expanding killing and kidnapping. More involvement by US advisors and trainers is likely to bring much more civilian death and suffering.

As to the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, the Acholi religious leaders published a statement that included:

Time and again, issues of spoilers both regionally and internationally have played a role in frustrating any attempts at peace. For any regional strategy to be successful, we feel that such spoilers need to be investigated, made known if found guilty, and held accountable for their actions in the interest of sustainable peace.
* * *
Regarding Section 7 of the bill, any transitional justice mechanism which seeks to foster reconciliation must ensure participation all those who have been engaged in the conflict, including the LRA, GoU, and the civilian population. This is to ensure accountability for all actions taken during the conflict as well as to illustrate the commitment of all to the process of healing our community.

… Let us learn from the past experiences where we have seen that violence only breeds more violence.

I have written about this here:
If Uganda Has Oil It Must Need The Pentagon’s Democracy
and the full text and contact information of the Acholi religious leaders is in comment #5.

No country or people can help another country and people unless they involve those other people in ways the employ some form of participatory democracy. Anything else is just imperialism tarted up to call itself humanitarian. The US is not there to help Uganda or Somalia or the DRC but to help itself to oil gold, coltan, agricultural land, and a variety of other resources.

I’ve written about the oil here:
Uganda – Oil Reserves To Rival Saudi Arabia?
with links at the bottom which provide more information about the 2008 raid on the LRA.

I ran across this earlier today, which points to even another conflict of interest over the S&P debt ratings:

US Debt Downgrade May Have Chinese Connection

S&P’s Action Appears to Have Triggered Enhanced Fortunes for Some US Business Interests in China

Standard & Poor’s recent downgrading of the US credit rating is being billed in the media as a major blow to the economic credibility of the nation and to the future election prospects of President Obama, but there are some special interests that appear to have benefited from that black mark on the US currency.

Those beneficiaries include the parent company of S&P as well as a Republican senator and aspiring vice presidential candidate
…
Within days of that action, another event occurred that was barely covered in the mainstream media.

The Chinese currency, the yuan, spiked suddenly in value, reaching in a few days a 17-year high against the dollar. And this was not an unexpected result
…
But what was not mentioned in the S&P press release was the fact that the rating agency’s parent company, McGraw-Hill Cos., has a major, and growing, presence in the Chinese market, according to its latest 10K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As a result, it would appear to be among the US companies that stands to benefit from a sharp rise in the value of Chinese currency, which seems to create at least the perception of a conflict of interest for the rating agency.
…
Two Republican US senators, both conservative but not viewed as Tea Party hardliners, played important roles in the debt-ceiling negotiations with the White House.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who is married to former US Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (whose father founded a shipping company that does business with China), as late as July 19 of this year made it clear that he was backing the Republican effort to hold out on making a deal with the White House over the debt ceiling, seemingly fueling the very type of partisan bickering that led to S&P’s downgrade.
…
One of McConnell’s chief advisors on those debt-ceiling talks was Ohio Sen. Rob Portman … individuals from McGraw-Hill Cos. donated $22,600 to Portman’s Senate bid in the 2009/2010 cycle — the most given in aggregate to any Congressional candidate by McGraw-Hill officials during that period

There is more on McConnell’s family business interests in China, and Portman has been vocal on the subject of Chinese currency.

…
In any event, any possible connection between S&P’s decision to downgrade US debt and those who might benefit from an increase in the value of Chinese currency triggered by such a downgrade, even if it is only a perception of a conflict of interest, should be fodder for Congressional hearings …

There is more information on all those involved, but I think I got the outline of the article here.

I think your analogy is particularly apt. Additionally, since this war is being waged by covert ops, mercenary corporations, and proxy soldiers, they are the ones driving US policy in the region. Policy becomes less and less accountable, or even known, to the President, the Congress, even to the Department of Defense, it is outside the control of the State Department, and almost completely unknown and unrelated to the American people.

The best (by far) of any coverage of Somalia is the blog africa comments. The commenter has been following Somalia for years, since well before this particular blog. There are usually weekly inclusive updates. If you want to understand what is going on in Somalia, africa comments is a must read.

I have written about the US use of African proxy soldiers here.

Roger Pociask linked to a DTIC pdf slideshow about AFRICOM for the future, calling the Somalia HOA activities Phase Zero. If you run through the slideshow the the last two slides, taken in sequence, are pretty funny.

Pociask also found a little news item that looks like South Sudan may be welcoming an AFRICOM base.