Borat: You’re preaching to the choir. I spent three years in Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) as a military advisor in the 1980s, so I got to see what you speak of first hand. In El Salvador, it was called the “14 Families”, that group of oligarchs and their extended relations that controlled the country, economically, politically and socially. They did so with tacit US support, mainly because we felt the greater threat was communism. As it turns out, we were mostly right, but not completely.

Mexico, interestingly, falls into the same category. Most people see Mexico as a democracy, but the truth is that Mexico has been controlled by a similarly small group of oligarchs in much the same way. Look at Carlos Slim (the world’s riches man) and how he controls the telecom industry in Mexico, with nary a peep from the country’s “regulatory” bodies.

I posted on another thread about the Patriot Act and FISA. Scary stuff and getting scarier. You look at the NSA’s capabilities when it comes to eavesdropping and you’re in conspiracy theory land pretty quick like.