Endurance

The merger of state and market, in the era of consolidated mass communication, allows for institutional control with minimal need to resort to force. Low level harassment of dissenters, made possible by fusion data centers, makes civil rights violations by police a routine, mundane law enforcement function. Already disinclined (by state-approved education and the carpet-bombing of advertising) to question authority, American consumers are unlikely to look for alternative interpretations of reality, especially if they are nearly invisible.

As fundamental forms of social organization, institutions (church and state) and markets wield considerably more control of most societies than tribes and networks. While not monolithic, the state and market do have near monopolies over finance and communications through control of key centers of power. Perspectives that contest their agendas of privatization and globalization are thus relatively easy to exclude or smother. One of the reasons the world indigenous peoples' movement (and other anti-globalization players) have had to deploy spectacular initiatives.

We won't, of course, hear anything from Secretary Clinton or President Obama about globalization, the main engine driving poverty and displacement in the developing world. Free Trade is neocolonial theft, globalization is mass murder, and the Obama/Clinton team are leading both.

Obama has steered health care into the ditch. Listening to bamababies defend his betrayal, you'd think the global microbial and viral plagues -- looming on the horizon as a result of Free Trade and privatization -- were science fiction, rather than epidemics already underway in regions where public health has collapsed. In this, the bamababies remind me of the innocent, wide-eyed Crakers, fictional characters created by Margaret Atwood in her novel Oryx and Crake.

Removal of the unusual and exclusion of the non-conforming is the primary purpose of state-sponsored education. Obama’s commitment to privatizing public education is an endorsement of indoctrinating American youth with the neoliberal, imperial, militarist viewpoint. This isn’t brainwashing per se, but it is propaganda, and it is oriented toward marginalizing those who question authority, even if it isn’t forbidden. And goodness knows, Obama’s owners have invested a lot in promoting a cult-like atmosphere around his candidacy and presidency. Still, if he wants to address America’s children, fine, as long as his message isn’t the final word.

As the Peruvian, Ecuadoran, and Colombian governments practice pro-privatization neoliberalism in pursuit of denuding the Amazon, the support of the United States is crucial in defeating the indigenous peoples defending their collective rights. Recent assurance from the Obama regime to Colombia's brutal President Uribe, has made it clear that international human rights instruments will be trampled on as US corporations rip apart the Amazon landscape for minerals, oil and timber, leaving behind nothing but an environmental wasteland and mass graves filled with natives.

With this militarization of social conflict under Free Trade of the Americas, the construction of plurinational states in the Andes and Amazon -- states where indigenous human rights are protected -- is now on hold while the indigenous organizations prepare for self-defense against invasion by US-backed militaries and mercenaries.

Meanwhile, states like Peru continue with a political process that is cumulatively degrading the rights of indigenous peoples until they are wiped out of their country's legal framework. Having murdered thousands of indigenous inhabitants of the region in recent years, the prospects for successful dialogue are as remote as the native villages now being razed by Free Trade.

Indigenous leaders in the Peruvian Amazon have "evicted" a Canadian mining company, as well as given notice to oil and timber companies to leave their territory. With the Peruvian government handing out these concessions without the indigenous owners' consent, military and paramilitary violence is expected to escalate.

The official obsession with terrorism has encouraged an hysterical idolatry of state power and absurd sanctification of the forces of law and order.
--Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Black Reagan is no FDR. Kiss health care goodbye.