New World Order

By E. Craig Coffin

The global corporate system, centered on massive financial cartels, threatens democracy worldwide.

The system, which Mexico's Zapatistas call "the beast" (la bestia), is the ultimate refinement of 500 years of global exploitation and plunder, which began when white people learned to circumnavigate the globe. Driven by the awesome Republicratic symbiosis, the US government has become the primary political facilitator and military enforcer for the beast.

From the ethnic cleansing of North America and the institutionalization of slavery to the bombing and enforced deprivation of Iraqi children, the US has consistently employed military aggression cloaked in democratic rhetoric to promote economic expansion. From colonialism to imperialism, to dependency, to debt slavery and the Clinton corollary "financial liberalization," the US has been an influential innovator for he politics of domination.

After WWII, the US was the only "Great Power" left standing, its industrial base intact and focused on the production of weapons of mass destruction. Worldwide, there were power vacuums to fill, weapons to sell and economies to rebuild, based on US capital. In order to keep the American people mobilized, Democrat President Truman & Republican Senator Vandenburg conspired with a number of bankers and lawyers for bankers to create a new enemy, a crusade, a plan. Thus began the policy of "containment."

Organizations like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were established to feed the beast.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the "international communist threat," a tremendously successful pretext, petered out. Another enemy was needed. The Bush administration switched the focus to Iraq. Since the American people had already been enculturated with an anti-Arab sentiment, Saddam Hussein was a convenient choice. The Clinton/Gore administration followed suit, and has been successful at developing a number of other "threats" as well. The "War on Drugs" is an effective pretext for escalating the civil war in Colombia.

The Clinton/Gore administration has served its corporate sponsors well, not only striving to maintain the system, but directing the institutionalization
of essential new elements as well, adding some finishing touches. Here are a few of the Clinton/Gore administration's dubious accomplishments:

• "Free trade" -- It has co-opted Democrats and their political allies, including big labor and environmentalists, into passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), further subjugating the people of Mexico, Canada and, yes, the US; same with GATT and its extension, the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA gone global! The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) still looms.

• China--Totally contradicting traditional democratic rhetoric, it has achieved overwhelming Republicratic approval of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with the military dictatorship which controls the world's largest source of cheap labor, paving China's way into the WTO. The US' second largest trade deficit can be expected to balloon, further subjugating the people of the US, as well as the rest of the world.

• Colombia--It has profoundly escalated the 36-year-old civil war. We, the people, will buy another $900 million-worth of weapons and helicopters from corporate giants like Textron and United Technologies, which just last year flooded the Democratic Party's accounts with funds. The weapons will help the most brutal army in the Americas and its paramilitary operatives to keep cocaine money flowing into the right accounts and oil flowing for Occidental Oil, which has invested $500,000 in the Democrats. Gore's extensive family investments in Occidental will, in turn, appreciate.

• Iraq--It has extended the US' barbaric war on the Iraqi people into an ongoing venture, further increasing the value of Occidental's Colombian reserves, among others. Meanwhile, the embargo is at least as deadly as the bombs.

• Mexico--NAFTA has been devastating, as have the periodic peso devaluations and the US-backed war in Chiapas. As in Colombia, all those Indians and their rain forests are in the way. There's oil to drill! We should stop trying to "beef up the border" and start taking a real good look at what makes so many people so desperate that they go through what they do to come here and work in slave-labor conditions.

• Turkey--It has supplied the Turkish government with massive amounts of military and police assistance for its terror and ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Kurdish people. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced as 3,500 villages have been destroyed.

• The Balkans--Ignoring the peace agreement which Milosevic had accepted, it launched a huge bombing campaign, which provoked Yugoslavia's massacre in Kosovo. This sent a not-so-subtle message to the countries which the Clinton/Gore administration was trying to sell on NATO membership. Yugoslavia is not a member. Turkey, which is, was honored for its help in the "humanitarian" bombing.

• Thailand--With the advice of Treasury Secretary Rubin, a former executive with the Saloman Brothers investment firm, it launched a "financial liberalization" campaign. The sudden flood of foreign money destabilized the Thai economy, setting off a chain reaction among other Asian economies, and fear of a worldwide recession. The beast pigged out.

• Sudan and Afghanistan--By bombing these two countries, the administration upstaged Clinton's mistress on the day she testified before Congress. It also destroyed a pharmaceuticals factory which had been providing some relief to thousands of Iraqi children. The bombings also fed the convenient anti-Arab sentiment in the US.

• Star Wars--It continued to pour money into Reagan's fantasy missile defense system, even though it doesn't work. If it did, it would re-escalate the threat of nuclear annihilation. Still, there is a wealth of enemies to imagine in order to please all those weapons contractors.

• "Urban Warrior"--It developed a series of mock invasions of various US cities. The pretext was preparation for various imagined calamities which might strike a US ally. When the US Marines "invaded" Monterey, we Greens were on the front lines opposing them from day one. A lot of good people from all around the Monterey Bay area joined us. The hovercrafts and the helicopters never landed. We won! We repelled the invaders . . . for now. During the week-long vigil, as eerie sense grew, that what the Marines were really preparing for was the possibility of having to keep their own brothers and sisters in line. The realization that the beast has turned on its keepers hit home. When a stranger sporting fatigues and a School of the Americas-kind of accent stood face to face with me and snapped a close-up photo, I caught a glimpse of the horror that all those thousands of students and other pro-democracy activists in Chile must have experienced when they were rounded up and taken away at the beginning of the coup of `73.

In 1959, when the Eisenhower Cabinet was wondering what to do about the new revolutionary government in Cuba, UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge told them, "We should focus on the Declaration of Independence rather than the Communist Manifesto, where (the focus) has been, and in doing so, we should not endeavor to sell the specific word `Capitalism' which is beyond rehabilitation in the minds of the non-white world." Think about it. What if we all pledged our allegiance to liberty and justice for all, and meant it?

From campaigning against NAFTA in order to get elected, and then voting for it, to accompanying Clinton to Colombia and returning to help sell the latest military "aid" package, Congressmember Sam Farr has done his part to help the administration keep us in line. Like our Presidential candidacy and our US Senate candidacy, our Green Congressional candidacy presents us all with a wonderful opportunity to kick off the millennium by getting out of line.