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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsChris Hedges: The Mexicanization of the United States (trade deals and neoliberalism)
from truthdig:
The Mexicanization of the United States
Posted on Mar 13, 2016
By Chris Hedges
[font size="1"]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)[/font]
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. ....................(more)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mexicanization_of_the_united_states_20160313
marmar
(76,982 posts)malaise
(267,808 posts)Rec
Someone should interview Polanyi's daughter Kari Levitt.
http://www.karipolanyilevitt.com/
MrMickeysMom
(20,453 posts)takeheed
(3 posts)For God's sake people, "Take Heed."
"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.
Gumboot
(531 posts)Always essential reading. Follow him at @ChrisLynnHedges
davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)Then we have various home grown drugs - bath salts in particular - that are ruining lives and even killing people. Opiate addiction is also a huge problem, even in rural America in small towns like the one I grew up in. When I was a young boy, I heard rumors about all of these things, but now....
A few years ago, a local high school in a town with a population of only a few thousand had a town meeting in it's performing arts center, to discuss opiate addiction and abuse. It was the largest such gathering of the town's citizens in recent history - more people attended than there were students (around 600 students, give or take a few) at the school - they filled the performing arts center, they filled the cafeteria when that was full - and there were still more people outside who wanted to go in. There was a lot of discussion about what could be done, how we could do things, the police chief made a presentation...
What they did not address at the time - what the community in common still does not address... is the fact that a lot of this is directly related to the crushing economic despair and poverty in our area. Up here in Maine we are losing business, we have lost six mills recently, some of the last few bastions where you could still get a decent paying job and survive. My county in particular has had it's population cut by half or more in the last couple of decades.
There used to be mills, factories, there used to be trains and railroads that were in operation. There used to be schools in the smaller towns (many had to close because the populations/student numbers became too small). Yet there are still not enough jobs in these areas to employ people. What jobs do exist... most of them pay minimum wage or slightly better. Most of them offer little or no actual benefits. A lot of them are under the table - even just a few years ago I worked for a farmer for 5 dollars an hour, under the table... and for a carpenter for the same, because I couldn't find anything else.
The root of the problem is financial inequality, poverty specifically. If we can create jobs and improve wages and benefits, I suspect we'd see a large drop in overall heroin and opiate use as well as the illegal sales of such. Yet the war on drugs marches on, a war that can never be one - a problem that can never be solved.... until we address the reasons for why it's such a problem to begin with.
We'd still have drug users (heavy and otherwise) even in a perfect economy, but far fewer would be selling them and/or using them. It's pretty damn sad that, no matter how desperate things get for the working poor, any politician that acknowledges their existence is mocked for being a "socialist". God forbid we should do anything at all to help out! God forbid we should acknowledge the wealth inequality, the disastrous trade policies, the broken social safety net, the fact that this "economic recovery" has gone almost entirely to the top 1%.
It makes me sad and it makes me feel sick, just to think about it. I could put together a giant, giant list of things we could solve through improving the lives and conditions of the working poor, but it will not be done until the issue is forced. I have been working poor for most of my life, but now, thanks to a recent job loss and injury... well, I'm just plain poor. Drugs really aren't my thing, they scare me - but I come across people every day who have fallen to addiction, or selling opiates, some who have become criminals for want of any better alternatives.
What gives me the greatest hope right now for a change... is the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and his acknowledgement of the truth.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)for blind loyalty
appalachiablue
(41,052 posts)Kick