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In Latin America, powerful popular movements are on the move to save their world from getting caught up, once again, in the claws of U.S. corporate imperialism, the 21st-century colonialism. In the rest of the world, however, what has already been accomplished by the privatizers in terms of taking over what by right belongs to the people will have to be taken back by powerful popular protest movements. Be it in Africa, in UK or in Bolivia, the gangrene that is spreading all over the planet through the multinational corporations has to be stopped.
The wheels of power are very clearly set on taking over all the wealth of the planet, everywhere, at any cost in lives and tax payers' money. Where there is no shortage of a commodity, the shortage is created, be it about water being supplied to Delhi from the Ganges river in India (Water Privatisation And Water Wars, By Vandana Shiva) - or about the obscene power transactions in California culminating in the rigged 2001 electrical blackouts.
THE CORPORATE WORLD OF ANYTHING GOES
Take India as an example of this world-wide abuse of commodities: the Yamuna river where the once readily available water for Delhi has been polluted by the big industries ("Two decades of industrialization have turned the Yamuna into a sewer and toxic drain" - quote from Vandana Shiva) and the people have to pay exorbitant prices for water that gets transported in giant pipelines from far away, in this case from the Ganges river, water which the poor can not afford.
Anything goes in today's world of corporate supremacy. The neocons have comfortably arranged the setting to keep the voices and the needs of the common man out of any form of decision making, mainly through the use of fear, secrecy and vicious propaganda as their tools. It now seems almost impossible to even pick up an end of a rope to try to find a lifesaving solution to this horrendous state of things. And we seem to be up against a wall because of the fact that the schemes so carefully worked out in the United States by the neocon regressives find a resonance in the Democratic Party. There is no one any more to counterbalance the totally destructive and self-destructive actions the big corporations are undertaking to dominate the entire world.
Someone may think that the present-day conundrum is a problem that mainly concerns the U.S. and the Middle East/Central Asia. Not so. We are all in the crucible to be mangled and melted and ground to a manageable pulp that can serve in the geopolitical games of the corporate lords of the planet. The governments, the G8 criminals, are not just doing the bidding of the corporate world. They ARE the corporate world.
THE WORLDWIDE SWINDLE
No government will ever come to the rescue of the people since all governments in the industrialized world are in on this gigantic swindle. The great world leaders are all lined up to take their share of the booty, be it in Iraq or Latin America or Africa. Give them a chance and they'll all be ready to jump. The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are putting their people in place to serve the interests of the corporations. George W. Bush is just one of their pawns.
If Chirac, the French president, and his government held out firmly against the U.S. plans to invade Iraq, it was not because of any compassionate feelings for the fate of the Iraqis and maybe not even any real understanding of the danger of bringing instability to that part of the world. The French government was only looking out for itself. France and Germany were both mainly tending to their own corporate interests, trying to keep some control over the unipolar world, this unipolarity being the mainstay of the PNAC articles of faith that have supplanted the U.S. Constitution and which is not well in tune with the planetary symphony.
When Blair played along with the U.S. in the illegal invasion of Iraq, it was because the UK government, Anthony Blair and the Chancellor to the Treasury, Gordon Brown, in particular, were confident that they would be rewarded by sharing in the booty after the takeover of Iraq. They have largely been disappointed in their hopes. But then - how can they possibly at this point find a way out of their misdirected collaboration with the great beast, playing second fiddle in the 'Power House' created by the neocons? (See: "How We Got Into this Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer").
When 'New Labour' came to power in UK, when Gerhard Schröder and the 'New Social Democrats' took over from Helmut Kohl in Germany in 1998, we had no idea that those supposedly leftist governments were going to sell us down the river, gleefully, knowingly and without a second thought. They both came to power during the '90s when Bill Clinton, the corporate pawn-in-chief was in power in Washington. All three were men of big words, compassionate words, promising the 'reforming of society'. Blair promised in 1997 that he was going to be the head of one of the greatest radical reform governments in History (qu'il conduirait "l'un des plus grands gouvernements radicaux réformateurs de notre Histoire" - that, under 'new Labour', Britain would no longer have to choose between the US and Europe.
FALLING BACK TO REALITY
Other European governments spoke as seductively of their concern for the people, of the European Union that was well under way, EU being the great saviour that was going to solve all the problems in the history of the continent. In fact, this alliance had been well under way since the European Coal and Steel Community was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1952. Now it was in the process of becoming a union including all of Europe and, or so we thought, of becoming a counterweight to the blundering monolith in the West. Would we finally, through our precious enlarged union, be able to stay the power of the all-devouring great beast, the United States of America? Hopes were high, but the fall back into reality was a hard one - for the leaders of this bogus 'neo-socialist' world.
There was a lot of talk about the European promised land. It turned out, however, that we would, according to the proposed EU Constitution (which has now been defeated by France and the Netherlands), be acting under the whip and carrot of the multinational corporations, the big arms industry in particular, which is of course tied in with all the other multinationals. We would be another hand in the U.S. dominated NATO alliance, a handy tool for the planetary takeover by Big Business. Social contracts would be forgotten, overruled by stock market concerns.
Privatization would be the rule of the land, 'la concurrence libre et non faussée' (= free and unalleviated competition) would now be the gospel of the future days of glory for the corporations, and a total disregard for the wellbeing of the common man. The middle class would see their comfortable cushions being stripped away layer by layer, the poor would be poorer, and the rich would be richer.
THE END OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The days of the American empire are clearly already counted, but the fall of the House of Bush and all the seemingly powerful forces shoring up George W. would only be a beginning of the end. If it's even that. It is a prerequisite, certainly, but the corporate world would probably still be intact and the religious followers of the money would continue on their trek. We must never forget that the gangrene goes way outside of any national borders and that all the serpents growing from the head of Medusa have to be slain.
The manipulators are very deliberately blurring our vision of what is actually going on in Iraq and elsewhere. They are heaping more or less important issues on our retinas and brains: scandals, real or invented, and also totally fabricated accounts of progress in Iraq and in the realm of national security, fake news that is spun for the benefit of the ignorant masses. But the question is now: how long are the masses going to remain blind? The day is close at hand when lots of various political and religious groups will see that they are being used, certainly not in their own interest, but exclusively to help the top guns finish their destructive game.
The only realistic way to fight back against this shortsighted scheme of ruling the world by a shallow and single-minded rich-getting-richer mentality must, of course, be popular mass movements as an answer to the people's loss of participation in everything concerning their own destinies.
The boundless greed of the few blind-leading-the-blind psychopaths has to be dealt with once and for all before it destroys the planet. It's high time to get organized. We must try to force the media to cooperate in our attempt to stop the gangrene or else we'll have to work through popular mass movements independent of the corporate media. In the eleventh hour, they will have to jump onboard if they want to survive at all. Signs are already appearing today that they see the flood coming and that they realize they are about to drown.
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Siv O'Neall was born and grew up in Sweden, graduated from Lund University. She is living in Lyon, France with her family after having lived extensively in Paris, France and in New Rochelle, N.Y. She is now retired but she has worked for many years as a French teacher in Westchester, N.Y. and as an English teacher in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France.
Copyright 2005 by Siv O'Neall
