09/22/10 – Christina Tobin – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santa War Radio.
Now, one thing that I don't know nearly enough about, I mean, I've read some books before, but by my standards, I don't know nearly enough about American imperial intervention in Latin America and in South America.
I don't even know if I know enough good questions to do a whole interview based on what's going on in Costa Rica right now, but I'm looking at an article in the Global Post, 7,000 Marines landing on the beaches of Costa Rica, and we talked with one guest about this a couple of few weeks ago, but now Christina Tobin is on the line, and apparently she went down to Costa Rica to see what was going on herself.
So I think I'll just turn this over to you, Christina, and you can tell us what you saw down there.
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, thank you for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
Great.
Well, I'm the president and founder of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation.
And several weeks ago, I went down to Costa Rica and had a meeting with the vice president of Costa Rica, Alfio Piva, and also the founder of the Libertarian Party, Otoe Guevara.
And what I learned is that, yes, the previous president, Arias, his name is Oscar Arias, actually signed to allow these 7,000 Marines to come into Costa Rica over a 10-year span, and in return, Costa Rica gets $300,000 a month.
So this is a $3.6 million deal for Costa Rica.
And the current president, Lauren Chinchilla, is not very happy about it.
And in any case, it's a big problem.
And these Marines have been sent down there to fight against drugs.
Very bad.
Mm-hmm.
Well, now, I'm just, I really don't even have a basis for this question other than just my imagination.
But I wonder if the parliament down there is really just a big front for the American empire anyway, or they just were made to offer they couldn't refuse, or what was the deal there?
Well, the Arias brothers are the big front.
The previous president, again, Oscar Arias, signed this agreement, and he plans to have his brother run, that's Rodrigo, I believe, Arias, after Lauren Chinchilla's turn.
So this was in 2014, I believe, or 2016, that is.
And in any case, they work very close with the Obama administration.
If you look up Arias, he's held events and put things together for Obama administration here in the United States.
And they've literally sold out their own country to the Obama administration.
So it's very problematic, and it goes much deeper than that.
The GMO issue is really big down there.
The United States...
The which issue?
The GMO, the genetically modified organisms in the food.
And what is happening is the United States government is forcing the people to rip out their organic farms and implement GMO foods provided by the United States, and they're making it mandatory for them to do this in order to export their products to the United States.
This is really fresh news that hardly anybody knows about it.
And in any case, it's a horrible thing, and Free and Equal Elections is going to be holding a conference down in Costa Rica in December, a panel on election reform, drugs, and war to educate not only the voters and the people of Costa Rica, but also the voters and people of the United States and nationwide, for that matter, as well, internationally.
So I guess their economy is really dependent on exporting food to the United States, so we get to dictate those kinds of terms, huh?
Well, the Obama camp is definitely doing that, and it just keeps going on and on.
The current vice president and founder of the Libertarian Party are very supportive of legalizing marijuana.
However, they've been informed by the United States government that if they go public with it, they're going to cut their exports to the United States.
So we actually have this, we'll be revealing this actual taped conversation with the founder of the Libertarian Party, Oto Guevara, who actually was very, very kind to let me interview him for about an hour or so, in great detail.
So it's valuable insight, and we're very excited.
We have here in California, working with Free and Equal, Gerald Murray, who actually introduced me to the vice president, and he'll be running for vice president 2014 down in Costa Rica, to try to stop and not allow more Marines to go into Costa Rica for the next presidential term.
So, you know, I don't know, I'm kind of confused as to what's really going on here.
They just, they want to have bases there forever, so they're going to build a new big Navy base and keep it?
Or is this really about using U.S. Marines to fight drug runners?
It's definitely about using U.S. Marines to fight drugs.
Both the current vice president, Alfeo Pivo, and the president, I mean, the founder of the Libertarian Party of Costa Rica, both informed us, myself, about that directly.
So in any case, you're going to see a spin down in Costa Rica, they're going to claim that it's for the hospitals, which is bogus.
And really what it comes down to is the United States government is bullying a sovereign country.
You know, they've been a sovereign country since 1948, and the fact that these Marines are now landing on the waters and the ground in Costa Rica, the people are very upset about it in Costa Rica.
They do not want this.
The reason why is the president, Laura Chinchilla, recently spoke at the U.N. this past Sunday, so you should check that out on YouTube.
That's funny.
It hadn't even occurred to me what the people of Costa Rica think, because it's just so unimportant as to what's going to actually happen, you know?
They are very, very angry, and you know, I want to shift this to how do we fix these problems?
You know, we can go and say, oh, the U.S. government is forcing GMOs, sovereign country, and you know, against drugs, because ultimately they want to control the pharmaceutical industry, and want to make sure that they have the control there between the bridge between Panama and Colombia is Costa Rica there, and through Mexico.
So in any case, the resolution to this is implementing proportional representation.
In the United States, 73 countries use it, including the U.K.
No country has used top two, which as you may already know, passed this primary in California, and that was backed by $5 million from corporations and health insurance companies that essentially, you know, the top two, what it is is the top two vote getters are the only ones on the ballot between the primary and general election.
It could be two Democrats, it could be two Republicans, and it would wipe out third parties and independents nationwide, and essentially the corporations and health insurance companies would choose the two candidates that they want on the ballot between the primary and general election.
So we need to squash top two.
In a way, that's kind of hilarious, isn't it, that the people of California would turn out for a referendum and approve that?
Well, what happened is they spent millions of dollars to do a write-in, a mail-in voting, that is, a campaign, weeks out of the election, four weeks plus outside of the election, lying to the voters saying that it increases voter turnout.
History, it's like arguing that the world is flat.
If you go and look at Richard Winger on BallotAccessNews, that's BallotAccessNews.org, in any case, the facts are there.
There's no political scientist that says that top two is just a terrible thing.
And in any case, what is a good thing is implementing proportional representation.
So both the vice presidents, as you may know, in Costa Rica, they use proportional representation.
Both the vice president and founders of the Libertarian Party are very supportive of an initiative for free and equal in 2012 for proportional representation here in California.
Yeah, well, you bring up the idea of legalizing drugs, and that way you have, I mean, just right off the bat, you'd have big companies come in that can have lawyers and access to courts and do everything above board, turn a black market into a plain old market.
And then they would outcompete, they would have the security force and legitimacy to outcompete any, you know, illegal drug runners and way undercut their prices.
And just it's not necessarily the same as saying, yes, it's good for children to use cocaine to just say that having drug wars doesn't work.
And you say, you know, the people in Costa Rica are coming to this conclusion.
There's a great piece in McClatchy newspapers about the drug war going on in Mexico and how it just doesn't work as a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
The more you militarize it, the higher up the prices are driven, the more incentive there is to people for people to enter the market and to kill each other fighting over who gets the monopoly control over the cartel and on and on and on it goes.
It's just simple economics.
And then but as you're pointing out, any time any country that's involved in the actual production or distribution of these drugs tries to do the obvious thing, the American Empire says, no way the consequences for you from us will be worse.
We promise.
Definitely.
It goes deeper than that.
You have these people being put in jail for Mark Emory for selling seeds to the United States.
I was actually there looking at his face when he was sentenced for five years and interviewed with his wife, Jody Emory, afterwards, and she is very supportive of proportional representation and also very supportive of joining in on a nationwide movement, uniting individuals from Bradley Manning to Mark Emory, you know, to get out of jail and these are the type of things free and equal stands for what the people want.
The people want no want legalization of marijuana and they do not want war.
So we have to implement proportional representation.
Free and equal will also be kicking off an all-inclusive gubernatorial debate in California and U.S. Senate in California in October, as well as Illinois, Oklahoma, Connecticut, possibly Kentucky, nationwide, of which we have to teach people that there are other candidates outside of the two-party system that are viable and.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for all the hard work you do, Christina, and for your time on the show today.
I really do appreciate your insight.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's Christina Tobin from Free and Equal.
You can find her all over the web.
See you all tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
Take care of friends you don't know about, and you might need them or when they might drop dead.