Markets, Murder and Trash: The Real New World Order Emerges in Juarez (Chris Floyd)

[Jan Klimkowski]

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America's supermarket shelves or become America's automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.

"It's a city based on markets and on trash," says Julián Cardona, a photographer who has chronicled the implosion. "Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash." Very much, then, a war for the 21st century.

...Mexico's war does not only belong to the postpolitical, postmoral world. It belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left which the leaders of "legitimate" politics, business and banking preach by example is greed.

...People often ask: why the savagery of Mexico's war? It is infamous for such inventive perversions as sewing one victim's flayed face to a soccer ball or hanging decapitated corpses from bridges by the ankles; and innovative torture, such as dipping people into vats of acid so that their limbs evaporate while doctors keep the victim conscious.

I answer tentatively that I think there is a correlation between the causelessness of Mexico's war and the savagery. The cruelty is in and of the nihilism, the greed for violence reflects the greed for brands, and becomes a brand in itself.

Precisely.

MSM does not allow any discussion of whether the ecoomic system described as "global market capitalism" is good or bad. MSM forever talks as if it is the ONLY economic system.

Anyone suggesting an alternate or genuinely transparent economic system is declared a "nut" or "kook". (A variant of the highly pejorative "conspiracy theorist".)

MSM takes "global" to connote a world getting smaller, more joined up, more equal. In reality "global" means a continuation of colonisation and slavery by C21st means - with wage arbitrage sending first world jobs to third world countries, where workers can be exploited and natural resources stolen and exhausted.

MSM declares "market" to connote efficiency. But all extant financial markets are inherently corrupt and gamed. They serve the wealthy and powerful, who create ever more opaque means of stealing existing and future earnings from workers, and then plunder national assets - such as pensions, healthcare and infrastructure - when their flawed financial schemes fail.

MSM treats "capitalism" with totally uncritical reverence, declaring it an unblemished good.

The murderous wars in Mexico, over control of the sale, marketing and supply of Addiction and Power, to generate profits for global banks and oligarchs, are an entirely logical development of "global market capitalism".

Indeed, global market capitalism may represent the End of History.

But not in Fukuyama's sense of liberal democracy and market capitalism as "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution".

Rather as tragic proof that a system that provides an outlet for man's lust for Power and Control, a hierarchy based on Violence and Fear, located in the ancient limbic brain, will drown man's capacity for altruistic and selfless action.

The unchecked insanities of "global market capitalism" may bring human history to an end.