The Mexicanization of the United States
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mexicanization_of_the_united_states_
20160313/
Posted on Mar 13, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Workers at one of the maquiladoras in Juarez, Mexico, raise flags in 2013.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, such factories have
proliferated, but critics of the pact say its effects have been economically
devastating on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre /
AP)
The neoliberal ideology that is the engine of corporate capitalism spews its
poison around the globe. Constitutions are rewritten by judicial fiat in a
mockery of democracy. Laws and regulations that impede corporate
exploitation are abolished. Corporations orchestrate legally sanctioned tax
boycotts. Free-trade deals destroy small farmers and businesses along with
labor unions and government agencies designed to protect the public from
contaminated air, water and food and from usurious creditors and lenders.
The press is transformed into an echo chamber for the corporate elites.
Wages stagnate or decline. Unemployment and underemployment soar. Social
services are curtailed or abolished in the name of austerity. The political
system becomes a charade. Dissent is criminalized. The ecocide by the fossil
fuel industry accelerates. State enterprises and utilities are sold to
corporations. The educational system mutates into vocational training.
Culture and the arts are replaced by sexual commodification, banal
entertainment and graphic depictions of violence. Infrastructures crumble.
The working poorsacrificed on the altar of corporate profit and suffering
job losses, bankruptcies, foreclosures, harassment and arrestwatch
helplessly as their dreams for themselves and their children evaporate. Some
are forced into an underground economy dominated by drugs, crime and human
trafficking. Some turn to opiates to blunt the despair. (Heroin use in the
United States has doubled since 2007.) Suicides mount. (There are more than
40,000 a year in the U.S.) Hunger spreads. (Some 48.1 million Americans,
including 15.3 million children, live in food-insecure households.) The
state, to prevent unrest, militarizes the police agencies and empowers them
to use lethal force against unarmed civilians. It fills the prisons.
From Mexico to Greece to the United States, the scenario is the same,
varying only in degree. Neoliberalism and globalization create a vast race
to the bottom. Duplicitous political elites, epitomized by Barack Obama and
Bill and Hillary Clinton, are or will be highly compensated for doling out
trillions in quantitative easing to banks and other financial firms while
delivering credulous voters to the corporate guillotine. Everyone and
everything, including the natural world, is transformed into a commodity to
exploit for profit.
The corporate pillage, as the Argentines have recently discovered, is
limitless. The new Argentine president, the right-wing Mauricio Macriput in
office by corporate backershas agreed to pay billions to a handful of hedge
funds that bought up the countrys debt for a pittance and then demanded
full repayment. Paul Singers Elliott Management alone will make $2.4
billion, as much as 15 times its initial investment.
The corporate looting is impervious to regulation or reform. It will
continue until there is nothing left to exploit or is halted by popular
revolt. It is creating frustrated and enraged populations that are being
seduced in the United States, Europe and elsewhere by demagogues and
protofascists. Fascism, like socialism, the economist Karl Polanyi wrote,
was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Left unchecked,
the present system will usher in a dystopia ruled by criminal power
structures, including Wall Street, and inflict tremendous suffering and
poverty on societies rent apart by global warming as well as internecine and
nihilistic violence. Mexico is not an anomaly. Mexico is the future.
In the U.S. there is the added dead weight of the war industry. We have
spent or obligated $4.4 trillion for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Iraq. In 15 years of war we have produced hundreds of thousands of dead,
millions of refugees, wholesale devastation in countries such as Iraq and
Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Islamic terrorists, a series of failed
states that stretches from Iraq and Syria to Libya, and obscene profits for
the arms manufacturers, who constitute the only real reason these wars are
still being fought. The national treasury is being drained for military
adventurism that makes us one of the most reviled nations on earth. At some
point the entire house of cards, including the speculative financial
markets, will collapse. And then, as John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost,
engorged without restraint, we will eat death.
We are devolving into a nation that increasingly resembles countries such as
Mexico and Greece where the destruction is more advanced. We are undergoing
a slow-motion crash. The continued reliance on established mechanisms of
political participation and reformthe chief mistake made by the supporters
of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanderswill not work. The
entire system has to be demolished, as radicals in parties such as Syriza
and Podemos understand. The effort is not only a war to bring down financial
systems. It is a war to bring down political systems. It is a war that
requires widespread and sustained popular revolt dedicated to overthrowing
all the mechanisms of corporate power.
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human
beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of
purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society, Polanyi warned
in The Great Transformation.
In disposing of a mans labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose
of the physical, psychological, and moral entity man attached to the tag,
he went on. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions,
human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would
die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion,
crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements,
neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety
jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.
I recently met with the Mexican activist Jessica Alcazar in New York for my
teleSUR broadcast Days of Revolt. She is a leader of Jóvenes ante la
Emergencia Nacional, a national organization that has mobilized against
state repression in Mexico and called for a return to Mexicos revolutionary
ethic. Alcazar says that the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 triggered a corporate coup détat in Mexico that
mirrors the corporate coup détat in the United States.
As a result of the signing of [NAFTA] in Mexico, all possibilities of
sovereignty were taken from us, even food sovereignty, Alcazar said. Since
NAFTA, the majority of the food we eat comes from the United States. There
is also a big migration problem for the indigenous people, with small
farmers leaving to the United States. Such is NAFTAs vortex. There is a
bloom of sweatshop factories, mainly car factories, an important industry.
These corporations bring in employment but offer low wages. The majority of
workers have no rights. They are paid by the hourseven pesos an hour [about
39 U.S. cents]. This is nothing compared to what people used to make.
The factories are suspected of having a connection with human trafficking,
because of the disappearance of young girls working in those factories, many
who eventually turn out to have been assassinated, she said. A clear
example of this happens in Chihuahua. There are thousands of missing girls
who worked in the factories. [There are] factories that know how to
disappear a person so they dont have to pay them. They either kill them or
traffic them into sexual slavery.
There have been some 27,000 registered disappearances in Mexico. More than
120,000 people have been killed since then-President Felipe Calderón sent
the army to patrol city streets in 2006, ostensibly to curb drug-related
violence.
The problem in Mexico is not only one of violence, but about social rights
being stripped away, rights which were won in the revolutionary process of
1917, Alcazar said, referring to the Mexican Revolution. Such rights
allowed anyone to have access to education, health, employment and housing.
The state and its neoliberal politics have been slowly transforming the
constitution. This means that the Mexican people have lost all of their
constitutional rights.
As many as 3 million Mexican farmers and their families were driven into
bankruptcy after American agro-businesses, because of NAFTA, began to flood
the market with cheap corn. This contributed to the creation of an economic
vacuum filled by financial speculators and drug cartels. The drug cartels in
Mexico conduct a $30-billion-a-year business. They not only sell drugs, most
destined for the United States, but trade in migrant workers, human organs,
kidnapping for ransom and the trafficking of women in sexual slavery.
U.S. military action similar to Mexicos 2006 deployment of the army into
cities is possible under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization
Act. Section 1021, which I successfully challenged in federal court before
the ruling was overturned on appeal, was signed into law by President Obama
on the final day of 2011. It effectively overturns the 1878 Posse Comitatus
Act, which barred the government from using the military as a domestic
police force. Section 1021 authorizes the federal government to order the
military to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens, hold
them indefinitely in military detention facilities and strip them of due
process if the state brands them as terrorists. The elites, even if they do
not publicly acknowledge it, know very well what is coming. They intend to
be prepared.
The devolution of the social and political order leads to a fusion between
criminals and the ruling elites. It creates, as Polanyi wrote, a Mafia
capitalism and a Mafia political system. In Mexico, mayors and other
municipal officials, law enforcement officers, judges and governors have
become indistinguishable from the drug cartels. Similarly in the United
States, financers from big banks and firms such as Goldman Sachsmany of
whom launder huge sums of money for illicit activity and openly carry out
billions of dollars in fraudare part of the inner circles of power.
Mexicos state oil company, Pemex, formed in 1938 to make sure the profits
from oil extraction remained in Mexico, is slowly being privatized. Mineral
rights, often on indigenous land, along with water rights have been sold to
foreign investors. Foreign corporations, as in the United States, are using
eminent domain to push people off their land. Resistance to the land
expropriation has been met by lethal state violence.
Mexican activists argue they must build an alliance with radical movements
in the United States and the rest of the world to reverse the corporate
coup. This will require global solidarity. Without it, no movement to take
back power from rapacious capitalism can succeed.
There are many organizations like ours which are trying to build [political
momentum] from outside the institutional left, from outside the political
parties, Alcazar said. The Zapatista Liberation Army is one of those
organizations. We believe that todays community resistance and willingness
to take a stand, especially from the indigenous communities, are very
important, like the work of snail cells, of autonomous Zapatista zones.
Its important to build from the ground up, to form independent
self-governments. Its a long process. We have to struggle to refound the
nation. We have to rewrite the constitution. We need a new way of
governance.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Mexicanization of the United States
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mexicanization_of_the_united_states_
20160313/
Posted on Mar 13, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Workers at one of the maquiladoras in Juarez, Mexico, raise flags in 2013.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, such factories have
proliferated, but critics of the pact say its effects have been economically
devastating on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre /
AP)
The neoliberal ideology that is the engine of corporate capitalism spews its
poison around the globe. Constitutions are rewritten by judicial fiat in a
mockery of democracy. Laws and regulations that impede corporate
exploitation are abolished. Corporations orchestrate legally sanctioned tax
boycotts. Free-trade deals destroy small farmers and businesses along with
labor unions and government agencies designed to protect the public from
contaminated air, water and food and from usurious creditors and lenders.
The press is transformed into an echo chamber for the corporate elites.
Wages stagnate or decline. Unemployment and underemployment soar. Social
services are curtailed or abolished in the name of austerity. The political
system becomes a charade. Dissent is criminalized. The ecocide by the fossil
fuel industry accelerates. State enterprises and utilities are sold to
corporations. The educational system mutates into vocational training.
Culture and the arts are replaced by sexual commodification, banal
entertainment and graphic depictions of violence. Infrastructures crumble.
The working poorsacrificed on the altar of corporate profit and suffering
job losses, bankruptcies, foreclosures, harassment and arrestwatch
helplessly as their dreams for themselves and their children evaporate. Some
are forced into an underground economy dominated by drugs, crime and human
trafficking. Some turn to opiates to blunt the despair. (Heroin use in the
United States has doubled since 2007.) Suicides mount. (There are more than
40,000 a year in the U.S.) Hunger spreads. (Some 48.1 million Americans,
including 15.3 million children, live in food-insecure households.) The
state, to prevent unrest, militarizes the police agencies and empowers them
to use lethal force against unarmed civilians. It fills the prisons.
From Mexico to Greece to the United States, the scenario is the same,
varying only in degree. Neoliberalism and globalization create a vast race
to the bottom. Duplicitous political elites, epitomized by Barack Obama and
Bill and Hillary Clinton, are or will be highly compensated for doling out
trillions in quantitative easing to banks and other financial firms while
delivering credulous voters to the corporate guillotine. Everyone and
everything, including the natural world, is transformed into a commodity to
exploit for profit.
The corporate pillage, as the Argentines have recently discovered, is
limitless. The new Argentine president, the right-wing Mauricio Macriput in
office by corporate backershas agreed to pay billions to a handful of hedge
funds that bought up the countrys debt for a pittance and then demanded
full repayment. Paul Singers Elliott Management alone will make $2.4
billion, as much as 15 times its initial investment.
The corporate looting is impervious to regulation or reform. It will
continue until there is nothing left to exploit or is halted by popular
revolt. It is creating frustrated and enraged populations that are being
seduced in the United States, Europe and elsewhere by demagogues and
protofascists. Fascism, like socialism, the economist Karl Polanyi wrote,
was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Left unchecked,
the present system will usher in a dystopia ruled by criminal power
structures, including Wall Street, and inflict tremendous suffering and
poverty on societies rent apart by global warming as well as internecine and
nihilistic violence. Mexico is not an anomaly. Mexico is the future.
In the U.S. there is the added dead weight of the war industry. We have
spent or obligated $4.4 trillion for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Iraq. In 15 years of war we have produced hundreds of thousands of dead,
millions of refugees, wholesale devastation in countries such as Iraq and
Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Islamic terrorists, a series of failed
states that stretches from Iraq and Syria to Libya, and obscene profits for
the arms manufacturers, who constitute the only real reason these wars are
still being fought. The national treasury is being drained for military
adventurism that makes us one of the most reviled nations on earth. At some
point the entire house of cards, including the speculative financial
markets, will collapse. And then, as John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost,
engorged without restraint, we will eat death.
We are devolving into a nation that increasingly resembles countries such as
Mexico and Greece where the destruction is more advanced. We are undergoing
a slow-motion crash. The continued reliance on established mechanisms of
political participation and reformthe chief mistake made by the supporters
of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanderswill not work. The
entire system has to be demolished, as radicals in parties such as Syriza
and Podemos understand. The effort is not only a war to bring down financial
systems. It is a war to bring down political systems. It is a war that
requires widespread and sustained popular revolt dedicated to overthrowing
all the mechanisms of corporate power.
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human
beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of
purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society, Polanyi warned
in The Great Transformation.
In disposing of a mans labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose
of the physical, psychological, and moral entity man attached to the tag,
he went on. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions,
human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would
die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion,
crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements,
neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety
jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.
I recently met with the Mexican activist Jessica Alcazar in New York for my
teleSUR broadcast Days of Revolt. She is a leader of Jóvenes ante la
Emergencia Nacional, a national organization that has mobilized against
state repression in Mexico and called for a return to Mexicos revolutionary
ethic. Alcazar says that the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 triggered a corporate coup détat in Mexico that
mirrors the corporate coup détat in the United States.
As a result of the signing of [NAFTA] in Mexico, all possibilities of
sovereignty were taken from us, even food sovereignty, Alcazar said. Since
NAFTA, the majority of the food we eat comes from the United States. There
is also a big migration problem for the indigenous people, with small
farmers leaving to the United States. Such is NAFTAs vortex. There is a
bloom of sweatshop factories, mainly car factories, an important industry.
These corporations bring in employment but offer low wages. The majority of
workers have no rights. They are paid by the hourseven pesos an hour [about
39 U.S. cents]. This is nothing compared to what people used to make.
The factories are suspected of having a connection with human trafficking,
because of the disappearance of young girls working in those factories, many
who eventually turn out to have been assassinated, she said. A clear
example of this happens in Chihuahua. There are thousands of missing girls
who worked in the factories. [There are] factories that know how to
disappear a person so they dont have to pay them. They either kill them or
traffic them into sexual slavery.
There have been some 27,000 registered disappearances in Mexico. More than
120,000 people have been killed since then-President Felipe Calderón sent
the army to patrol city streets in 2006, ostensibly to curb drug-related
violence.
The problem in Mexico is not only one of violence, but about social rights
being stripped away, rights which were won in the revolutionary process of
1917, Alcazar said, referring to the Mexican Revolution. Such rights
allowed anyone to have access to education, health, employment and housing.
The state and its neoliberal politics have been slowly transforming the
constitution. This means that the Mexican people have lost all of their
constitutional rights.
As many as 3 million Mexican farmers and their families were driven into
bankruptcy after American agro-businesses, because of NAFTA, began to flood
the market with cheap corn. This contributed to the creation of an economic
vacuum filled by financial speculators and drug cartels. The drug cartels in
Mexico conduct a $30-billion-a-year business. They not only sell drugs, most
destined for the United States, but trade in migrant workers, human organs,
kidnapping for ransom and the trafficking of women in sexual slavery.
U.S. military action similar to Mexicos 2006 deployment of the army into
cities is possible under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization
Act. Section 1021, which I successfully challenged in federal court before
the ruling was overturned on appeal, was signed into law by President Obama
on the final day of 2011. It effectively overturns the 1878 Posse Comitatus
Act, which barred the government from using the military as a domestic
police force. Section 1021 authorizes the federal government to order the
military to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens, hold
them indefinitely in military detention facilities and strip them of due
process if the state brands them as terrorists. The elites, even if they do
not publicly acknowledge it, know very well what is coming. They intend to
be prepared.
The devolution of the social and political order leads to a fusion between
criminals and the ruling elites. It creates, as Polanyi wrote, a Mafia
capitalism and a Mafia political system. In Mexico, mayors and other
municipal officials, law enforcement officers, judges and governors have
become indistinguishable from the drug cartels. Similarly in the United
States, financers from big banks and firms such as Goldman Sachsmany of
whom launder huge sums of money for illicit activity and openly carry out
billions of dollars in fraudare part of the inner circles of power.
Mexicos state oil company, Pemex, formed in 1938 to make sure the profits
from oil extraction remained in Mexico, is slowly being privatized. Mineral
rights, often on indigenous land, along with water rights have been sold to
foreign investors. Foreign corporations, as in the United States, are using
eminent domain to push people off their land. Resistance to the land
expropriation has been met by lethal state violence.
Mexican activists argue they must build an alliance with radical movements
in the United States and the rest of the world to reverse the corporate
coup. This will require global solidarity. Without it, no movement to take
back power from rapacious capitalism can succeed.
There are many organizations like ours which are trying to build [political
momentum] from outside the institutional left, from outside the political
parties, Alcazar said. The Zapatista Liberation Army is one of those
organizations. We believe that todays community resistance and willingness
to take a stand, especially from the indigenous communities, are very
important, like the work of snail cells, of autonomous Zapatista zones.
Its important to build from the ground up, to form independent
self-governments. Its a long process. We have to struggle to refound the
nation. We have to rewrite the constitution. We need a new way of
governance.
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