A National Strike today has closed all business, schools, offices and public venues today in Colombia. Demonstrations are happening in every city and village in the country to protest murder, taxing low incomes UP to the wealthy, and a bungled COVID response rivaling only Brazil and the United States.
The issue? The announcement by Far-Right President Ivan Duque that taxes will be raised on food, electricity, utilities and all consumer goods to pay for Coronavirus Relief, allegedly. But there is deep suspicion, that like here under the last guy, the higher taxes will go to fuel more tax breaks for the wealthy, more deductions, more exemptions, more graft and more slush fund income. Its a deadly travesty playing out in our best ally in Latin America.
The government has targeted lower incomes to raise several billion dollars, claiming that its also raising taxes on the wealthy, but as in the United States, investment Income, land income, and capital assets are NOT taxed at the same rate, or at all, effectively making this tax apply only to low and middle income people. The average middle income per month earnings hovers around 600 USD. At the low end of Middle Income, the earnings in Colombia averages around 275 USD. That is for a family of four.
A loaf of bread and a gallon of milk are ALMOST as expensive as in the United States, so many people there choose between rent and food, while the few ultra-rich grow richer and take their monthly vacations in Davos and Paris.
The burden of more taxation on precisely the people who have been unemployed, underemployed and had NO government assistance, and now NO vaccines except for those who can afford a Private Health Plan, is now creating white hot anger among the rank and file working people because of the unfairness of the pushing of the Neoliberal economic model, since about 1990. As the United States’ primary “client state” in Latin America, I wonder where they got the idea to give tax exemptions to the wealthy and lower wages for working people, with high taxation?
This is the harm WE have done in the world by embracing Punish Work and Reward Wealth, since Milton Friedman’s Supply Side Chicago School of Top Down Economics and Richard Nixon created a CIA coup in Chile in 1972 to create the conditions for a Right Wing Military Government to soak the people, end all hope of democracy, and put into place a repressive economic regime all over Latin America.
That coup against democracy continues today in Colombia. 38 community organizers, union leaders and land reform Indigenous people have been killed by paramilitary forces allied with the former President, Ultra Conservative Alberto Uribe, and the current President Ivan Duque just in 2021. Over 350 were killed last year in an escalating program of politics by murder by the wealthiest Colombians. Our allies.
Twenty two Native Americans in a village in Cauca, in the Southwest, were gunned down two days ago attending a funeral for a murdered Governor, who was Indigenous, and the local people captured 5 gunmen, members of the Paramilitary Right, allies of the Landowners and the former President.
They act with impunity. They act with murderous intent to preserve their privileges. They act knowing the United States will do nothing to bring JUSTICE to working people in Colombia, because we cannot do it here. We will give them arms, herbicides and helicopters, and say little or nothing to this genocide of Native Americans, in OUR NAME.
It is time. It is time for all Americans with a conscience to say to OUR Administration. Today. Act. Tell the Colombian Government to roll back plans to tax low income people’s food, and if the killings of Indigenous people and Union organizers do not stop immediately, expect dire consequences from the United States. Neoliberalism, the faith that wealth is reward for personal virtue, and markets control governments, is dead here now. Lets make sure it dies in Latin America before more people, our own friends and neighbors, are gunned down by a fascist cabal intent on keeping their dirty money incomes forever.
We must get our house in order to save the lives and the dignity of millions of people worldwide whose governments are given PERMISSION to do this thievery and murder which we largely escape, but which hangs over our heads like a sword on a thread.