If the planet and the human race survive global corporate predation, it's going to be a long war between the new "robber barons" (monopolistic international megacorps with no loyalty to anyone) and the slave labor they desire (the rest of us), but the humanists and progressives will win in the end, just as we succeeded against other monstrous institutions--the Medieval church, the Inquisition, feudalism, monarchy, royal succession and privilege, the Bourbons, the Tsars, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ancien Regime, state religion, the slave trade, the British Raj, Colonialism, Stalinism, Nazism, Japanese imperialism, institutionalized racial and sexual bigotry, segregation, apartheid, male privilege and domination, and serfdom, slavery and tyranny of every kind. The trend of human history and evolution is overwhelmingly humanist and progressive, and is inherently and genetically unfavorable to monolithic structures. Next is predatory capitalism and corporate agriculture--the planet killers.
True, we are up against it now. In a mere one hundred years, industrial capitalists have managed to rip holes in the planet's atmosphere and send the weather atilt and out of control--a grave threat to all life on earth. The World Wildlife Fund gives the planet 50 years--that is, 50 years to planetary DEATH--at present levels of pollution, consumption, loss of biodiversity and other environmental destruction. US-based global corporate predators--the primary drivers of planet suicide--are in the process of removing all controls on their rampage--by destroying the progressive US middle class, through economic punishment, destruction of the Constitution and honest journalism, and direct corporate control of vote counting with "trade secret" tabulation programs--just as other countries are beginning to realize how important those controls are, for themselves, for the US and the global economy, and for planetary survival. As the Chinese struggle to create an environmental movement, the US, under the Clinton and Bush regimes, has seen its once strong environmental movement and regulatory program undermined and then destroyed.
The US environmental movement's inability to pressure the US into signing the watered down Kyoto Protocols, under Clinton, was the alarm signal. The Democratic Party was no longer responsive to the will of the people, and no longer cared about the best interests of the country and the planet. Its adoption of "free trade" policy (global corporate predation) in the outsourcing of jobs was the corollary to this, on the labor front. And the Bush Junta inflicted the coup de grace--turning the EPA and all environmental law-making over to global corporate predator lawyers, and embarking on one of the biggest pollution disasters of all time: the Iraq War.
US global corporate predators, and their brainwashed consumers, are responsible for 25% of planetary pollution. With public education and proper leadership, the US could eliminate all pollution, at no great cost in the short term, and at enormous financial, quality of life and environmental gains in the long term. Very simple measures--changing the kind of light bulbs that are used, putting solar panels on roofs, banning pesticides and encouraging organic farming and local farmers' markets, and smaller automobiles, if they had been started twenty years ago--when Reagan was leading the Era of Greed, and, not incidentally slaughtering tens of thousands of indigenous peasant farmers and others in Guatemala, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries--this planetary environmental crisis could have been averted. The US example--and its enforcement of environmental laws in foreign trade deals--could have led the world in a quite different direction.
So now we have to face the consequences of the Era of Greed, and its apocalyptic conclusion--the Bush Junta. As has been clear all along, the fates of workers and ordinary people are directly linked to planetary survival. If you destroy good jobs in the US, and outsource manufacturing to cheap labor markets abroad, you create a network of oil tankers and high-pollution aircraft in between natural resources, manufacturers and consumers, creating more air pollution and contributing to the destruction of ocean fisheries--just one example of the environmental devastation wrought by unregulated "free trade" (global corporate piracy). Other elements of "free trade" destroy the country where cheap labor is being exploited, for instance, by dumping US ag produce on the markets of poor countries and quite deliberately destroying local small farmers. (There have been tens of thousands of suicides of small farmers in India, South Korea and other places, due to this dreadful policy.) The target country can no longer feed itself.
Corporate manufacturers with cheap jobs to offer then move in, drawing millions of people from broken farming communities into urban areas, and addicting them to non-nutritious, imported corporate food. The World Bank/IMF also plays a role by offering loans to the local rich elite, who rip off the money and leave the poor to pay the debt, on onerous terms, such as, a) gutting all education and social welfare programs, and b) ripping the country open to global corporate predator sweatshops and resource extraction. The taxes and other government revenues that would be used to alleviate the impacts of "free trade" go instead to foreign bankers and rich investors. The country's oil, gas, mineral, forest and other resources are meanwhile bled out the country, at no benefit to the people who live there. Illiteracy, extreme poverty and poor health abound.
In South America, this is called "neo-liberalism," and it is being strongly rejected in country after country. Venezuela has been leading the regional fight for a new paradigm, based on Latin American self-determination and cooperation. This is why Hugo Chavez and the Chavez government are so hated by the Bushites and Corporate Democrats. Venezuela is one of the strongest, most vibrant democracies in South America. It should be a natural ally of the US, if the US government was even slightly sincere about promotion of democracy and the welfare of all peoples. Instead, they try to demonize Chavez--the most innovative thinker in Latin America since Simon Bolivar--and insult the people who have repeatedly elected him, and, indeed, who defended him and their Constitution against a violent military coup attempt.
The Bushites are losing this battle. Leftist (majorityist) governments have now been elected in most of South America--in addition to Venezuela--Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. Also Nicaragua. And there are strong leftist movements in Peru and Paraguay (likely to win future elections), as well as Mexico. The people of Latin America have had it with "free trade." They are going with the Bank of the South (started by Venezuela, in opposition to World Bank/IMF policy), and Mercosur (South American trade group, probably precursor to a South American "Common Market" and common currency). This is the overwhelming trend, with dinosauric exceptions like Colombia (a disaster area of rightwing paramilitary drug trafficking, mass murder of union organizers, peasants and leftists, and fascist--read Bushite--plotting), and occasional wily defections, like Lulu da Silva's connivance with Bush on biofuels (Brazil), which will more than likely be a labor/enviromental disaster and be abandoned in the long term.
Lulu is using the pressure on the Bushites from Chavez and the left, to weasel this biofuel deal for Brazil, but there is great opposition to it from environmental groups--because of its impacts to the Amazon--and from small farmers, workers and the indigenous. Lulu is not a bad guy. He just made a big mistake. Uruguay, on the other hand, turned down Bush's "free trade" deals, as have others; and, more than this, Bush, on his recent tour, had to endure public lectures by Latin American leaders, from Brazil to Mexico, on the SOVEREIGNTY of Latin American countries, with the Bush-leaning president of Mexico, Calderon, actually mentioning Venezuela as an example. This is probably due to the rightwing paramilitary plotting in Colombia that has recently been exposed, with connection to the top echelons of the Uribe government, on whom the Bush Junta has larded billions of US taxpayer dollars in military aid. But it is indicative of the general trend: rejection of US domination, with even center/right governments, under enormous pressure from the Left (majority) in their own countries and throughout Latin America, trying to distance themselves from the Bush regime and bad trade deals. To the extent that "free trade" has any mitigation for workers and the poor, and the environment, it is due to this extraordinary new, grass roots-driven, Bolivarian movement (Latin American self-determination), led by Venezuela.
When workers in the US suffer, workers everywhere suffer. When the environment in the US suffers, the environment everywhere suffers. This is the bad exponential power of US global corporate predator "free trade." The ripple effects are enormous, not just in immediate pollution and destruction, but in the long term abilities of countries to cope with environmental and economic destruction, and recover from it; and not just in immediate loss of small farmers (and organic food) and associated dislocation, but in the country's ability to cope with these problems and to be fair and just to its work force, and its ability to create better social conditions, aimed at prosperity.
In response to this latest set of horrors from the North, in South America, we are seeing the remarkable rebirth of the Enlightenment that produced the first American Revolution (our own). The watch words are self-determination, independence, the sovereignty of the people, democracy; there are also high levels of citizen participation in government and in small business (especially notable in Venezuela and Argentina).
The South Americans are the leading edge of human progress in the western hemisphere, not the US. We are way behind. We are losing rights, losing sovereignty, and losing control over our own fates and that of the planet. Not to mention the loss of jobs. We long ago lost control of most of our natural resources to predatory capitalists, and now they are trying to get the last of it--water, park lands and reserves, coastal protection zones and the Arctic wilderness where oil drilling has been forbidden, and forests, as well as their monopoly/privatization of various forms of energy. Worst of all, we have lost the right to vote--to "trade secret," proprietary, corporate-controlled vote counting machines.
In Venezuela, they use electronic voting, but it is an open source system--anyone may review the code by which votes are tabulated--and, importantly, they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the ballots, as a check on machine fraud. Know how much WE handcount? 0% to 1%, depending on how much of a stranglehold the Bushite voting machine companies have on county/state election officials. Many states have a ZERO audit of these machines. Know how much the Democrats in Congress are proposing?--2%--a mere bandaid on an egregiously corrupt election system; an illusion of reform. 2% = 98% of the ballots will never be seen by human eyes.
Tells you a lot.
People like Alan S. Binder (the shills and profiteers of global corporate piracy) have reason to be concerned. It is only a matter of time before US workers and other citizens catch up with their southern brethren and sistren. American Revolution II has already begun.
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Discussion and excerpts of Binder's WaPo article (ref for my journal--this OP):
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3257958Good info source:
www.venezuelanalysis.com
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