they are challenging him, in cahoots with imitators and acolytes like Chevron, with the same motives--confining wealth and power to the few.
The Roman Catholic Church is the prototype for fascist control of land, resources and those who actually work for a living (farmers, builders, tradesmen, weavers, teachers, mothers, housekeepers, et al). They enforced the feudal system across Europe for a thousand years, pioneering the kind of "Big Lie" corporate propaganda techniques we see on TV today--saturation bombing of the mind, imprisonment of the mind within very narrow parameters which define say, Heaven, as a new toothpaste or automobile. The "Big Lie" is so pervasive that no one can even think outside of its confines, to a life, say, not dominated by the Church as "mediatrix" of God's horrible punishments. Similarly, those trapped in modern corporate-designed confinement find it extremely difficult to imagine--let alone create--a reality outside of corporate products and controls.
Like the Catholic Church, modern multinational corporations are monolithic, top-down organizations, run by monarchs who assert sovereignty, just like a country, but don't belong to any country and don't really recognize democratic countries having a right to control them. Corporations like Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Drummond, Chiquita, Bechtel, Monsanto, exist in a rarefied aether above us all, in the clouds, and drop down into whatever countries have things that they want--oil, ag lands, slave labor, public services to loot, war machine to hijack--and take what they want, to the extent that they can bribe, bully and extort obedience from local government leaders, or topple good governments and install bad ones. They believe that they are above democracy, above the law, that they have the rights of "gods" to direct human activity, and they enforce these views with massive propaganda machines--the entire corporate press corps (owned and controlled basically by five fatcat, far rightwing billionaires, so like the monolithic propaganda machine of the Catholic Church). Lately, they managed to hijack a former democracy's entire massive war machine for corporate resource wars--much like the Popes commandeering the armies of Europe to carry out "Crusades" against Islamic peoples in the "Holy Land," back in the Church's heyday.
Our corporations are hauntingly similar to the Roman Catholic Church. Roundabout the 5th century AD, that Church abandoned the gospel of "love thy neighbor" and adopted the Pagan Roman notion of "pricks should rule" without the mitigating worship of Mother Earth. This Rule by Church Prick consolidated itself around the 9th-10th centuries, and lasted, virtually unchallenged, through about the 16th century AD, but continued to hold enormous power and cause enormous trouble for several more centuries.
Business people, business corporations, trade and the "marketplace," were initially a liberalizing influence in Euro-American culture. They fostered science, education, creative invention, sea travel, adventure, secular values such as equality (vs noble birth prerogatives), rational thought, progressive improvement of society and human and civil rights, as opposed to the religio/monarchic culture of the Roman Catholic Church. But within about a century of the 18th century "Enlightenment," business corporations and the Church began to be interchangeable, in their characteristics. Business started to become stultifying, repressive, propagandistic and monopolistic. (Thomas Jefferson and others had warned against this, but to no avail. The Constitution did not--and possibly could not have--prevented it.) American democrats fought back against the "robber barons" and so forth, through the "New Deal" era, but have lost that struggle, recently. The "robber barons" won. And they did so with techniques pioneered by the Popes, one after another, finally gaining transglobal control for many centuries.
The pricks of the Church, circa 500 AD, began calling themselves "patriarchs." They conducted pogroms against the real Christians (who were egalitarian--women had equal status, for instance), and they created the monolithic, dictatorial, prick = god, trans-national corporation that ruled Europe from Rome, acquiring vast lands, wealth and power--the Vatican/Papal institution we see today, still trying to use its self-asserted phone line to God to control human affairs. The Church's wealth today is in investments and banks, fed by donations, not so much in lands extorted from monarchs who had bought all the malarky about "Hell" and "Purgatory" (give vast tracks of fertile land to the bishop or monastery, get credits against your stay in the fires of Purgatory--kind of like 'time off for good behavior' in prisons--and the Church will keep your serfs in line).
So those who control Church wealth today naturally identify with the rich and the super-rich and are allied with them against democrats like Correa. Their bizarre, Opus-Dei-type, fascist organization, with its new, "Crusader"-imitation robes*--the "Heralds of the Gospel"--are an obscene rebirth of medieval oppression and fascist "black hand" methods for imprisoning the minds of the poor majority and terrorizing and murdering those who will not knuckle under. They are very likely allied with the "black eagles" in Colombia, and all of them are probably funded by the trillion-plus dollar cocaine revenue stream, laundered through U.S., European and probably Vatican banks, as well as by billions from U.S. taxpayers in military aid and USAID political propaganda funds (and unknown CIA funds).
I am very hard on the organized structure of the Church and the pricks running it for good reason. I know it well, believe me. And I also know that there is a vast underclass in the Catholic Church, consisting of women who actually do all the work at the "bottom," "lay people"--non-clerical Catholics, both church-going and alienated--and priests, monks and nuns, all of whom actually believe in, "Love they neighbor." These--the vast majority of Catholics--are disdained, despised, spat upon, ignored, lied to, exploited, taxed, bullied and abused by the pricks running the Church.
They really are pricks. There is no other word for it. They worship their own pricks. They think that a prick makes you more 'God-like.' They think women are dirty and dangerous. These are sick people, with profound lies at the heart of their belief system and profound sins of arrogance and self-worship on their consciences.
Correa refers to one of the real Christian groups--the Discalced Carmelites**--and the arrogant removal of this group and replacement with the Pope's Crusaders--the "Heralds," who are no more heralds of the "Gospel" than the Pope is. They are "heralds" of repression, mysogyny, terrorism and war. They intend to destroy democracy in Ecuador because it won't be bribed and bullied by Chevron (i.e., the $10 billion judgement against Chevron for polluting a vast tract of the Amazon) and won't let the World Bank/IMF loot the poor. They intend to destroy democracy in Venezuela as well, for similar reasons. Their "black eagle" brethren have already destroyed democracy in Colombia. This rich oil region--Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador--is on the Pentagon's Big Dartboard, with Venezuela and Ecuador yet to be conquered. The "Heralds" will be working hand-in-glove with the Pentagon, the CIA and others, to bring these countries back under corpo-fascist control.
This is a very great battle that has erupted, of the rich, the fascist and the corporate, against the poor, the democratic and the communal. The Church hierarchy has chosen Chevron, et al, over the people. That's what the "Heralds" are all about. This is certainly no surprise. But I very much hope that it is the last gasp of Vatican sin and crime in the world, and the end of that monstrously disfigured 'christian' institution. How much disgrace can it heap on itself before it crumbles into dust?
_________
*(The "Heralds of the Gospel" wear "knee-length black riding boots, a white cassock with a large brown scapular, bearing a half white, half red cross extending from neck to hem with arms in the shape of fleurs-de-lys. The order, recognised in 2001 by the Pope, lives by a
military as well as a religious
discipline." --from the OP (my emphasis)
**(The Discalced Carmelites, or Barefoot Carmelites, is a Catholic mendicant order with roots in the eremitic tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. The order was established in 1593, pursuant to the reform of the Carmelite Order by two Spanish saints, St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discalced_CarmelitesMy note: The Carmelites are known for their genuine commitment to the poor and the sincerity of their own deliberate poverty. They are not "militant." They are gentle believers in "Love thy neighbor.")
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