Amidst the 101 new or expanded bureaucratic ant farms proposed by Mr. Clinton in his droning, 89-minute State of the Union speech, those who nodded off can be forgiven if they missed his promise to wade us deeper into the Colombian civil war against the dreaded "narco-traffickers" by "going after their money."
Since Democrats always go after everyone's money, this might at first seem nothing new.
In reality, however, it turns out this initiative is already well enough along that The Associated Press was able to note its effects as long ago as Dec. 4 under the headline: "Colombian economy crashes after cocaine high."
And let me tell you, I was getting pretty puzzled as I waded into this 900-word dispatch.
"For nearly all this decade, Colombia's economy benefitted from cocaine trafficking," began AP's Bogota correspondent, Frank Bajak. "Construction boomed. Car sales climbed. Real estate values soared. ... Regardless of whether they were involved in the drug trade, most Colombians benefited indirectly as billions of dollars flooded into the economy via the cocaine gangs."
But now, presto change-o, Colombia is in the midst of its worst recession in decades. Ranch acreage that was driven up to four and five times its earlier price is now falling again, prime dairy farmland plunging from $9,000 to $3,000 an acre in just two years.
Is this the kind of recession that hit the rubber plantations of Brazil and Sumatra when artificial fabrics were invented that could make a better tire than natural rubber? Has someone invented a superior synthetic cocaine, or has the rest of the world lost its taste for this once-hot commodity?
A little more digging finally provides the answer. Two-thirds of the way through Mr. Bajak's portrait of a nation on the skids, we learn: "Beginning in 1995, a U.S. aided police crackdown captured the Cali cartel's top leaders and seized dozens of trafficker ranches and mansions."
Then, last fall, under U.S. "guidance," embattled Colombian puppet President Andres Pastrana started trying to "stem unregulated imports with toughened laws and fines," to "protect" domestic Colombian manufacture.
Through the fog, the picture begins to grow clearer.
President Pastrana has also adopted -- again with the encouragement and "guidance" of the narco-terrorists of the gringo DEA -- American-style "anti-money-laundering" measures, under which the government freely snoops around in private bank accounts, seizing any sums they suspect may have come from drug proceeds.
Ah. Now we've got it.
As a result, the drug lords have simply moved their money offshore as fast as they can dial their phones, "to take advantage of lax controls on money flows" in other nations. You know -- what used to be called "bank confidentiality."
And it's "not just drug traffickers who are pulling their cash out. Upper-class Colombians are shifting investments aboard -- a sign of lost confidence," explains Salamon Kalmanovitz, director of the country's central bank.
Not to worry. So the new "anti-money-laundering" laws may aggravate Colombia's economic distress "in the short term," explains Gregory Passic, a former DEA finance expert now working for the National Drug Intelligence Center. But hey, "Once your dopers decide where the capital goes instead of the government or industry, then you're really in trouble," Mr. Passic smiles.
Of course. We couldn't allow the folks who manufacture and sell the products which are in intense demand all over the world to decide where their money goes. No no no. The "government" must decide where their money goes.
And if the result is that a once-rich nation sees its economy shrink 6.9 percent in the first half of 1999 as the coca barons ship cartons of cash to Rio or Geneva, leaving a puppet president to desperately apply for $6.9 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund to hurl into the abyss, while tens of thousands of guerrillas out in the mountains gear up to fight a war of resistance against the American drug police and their puppet regime, well, what's a little "aggravated distress in the short term"?
How would American react if some foreign power came in here with "advisors" to show their puppet government in Washington how to burn, poison or seize the lands and factories where Americans grow "contraband" tobacco, produce "decadent" movies and TV shows, and distill foul and evil beer and whiskey which someone has been illegally "smuggling" to eager consumers in the European Union or the United Arab Satrapy, violating their newly dreamed-up import restrictions?
How would we feel if they taught our government drones how to enact "tougher laws and fines" to keep us from buying cheap imported cars and televisions and computers with the proceeds of such evil enterprises? And what would we do if these foreign "advisers" taught our Washington masters how to install "anti-money-laundering" programs in our banks, designed to locate and seize any moneys which we'd earned through transactions now "banned" by the distant EU or UAS?
I bet there'd be tens of thousands of American farmboys out in the mountains and the woods, gearing up to fight a civil war ... just like they're doing now in Colombia.
The only remaining question is why such a flight of capital (start ital)hasn't(end ital) yet happened here -- since the DEA has indeed foisted the same intrusive, guilty-till-proven-innocent "snoop and seizure" laws on our own domestic financial institutions.
I suspect the answer is: "It has." Just try pulling $10,000 cash out of your account with no explanation, or depositing money you've made selling constitutionally-protected firearms to "unapproved buyers," or proceeds from an "unauthorized" online sport book ... a lesson recently learned by upscale Las Vegas developer Billy Walters.
I suspect the smart money has increasingly begun to flee America's government-run banks. We just write it off as a "low savings rate."
As the Firesign Theater used to sing: "We're bringing the war back home ..."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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