Mexico: What Do Third-world Countries Share with the U.S.?

Now it’s official. General McChrystal has been placed in the pantheon of American icons, sanctified next to the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. He now aligns with the many American gods that are manufactured as fast as a Big Mac or an Egg McMuffin. Heroes like these are not human. They only play the image of what America wants them to be, but mostly they reflect the self-delusion of the American culture, a bubble where we are morally superior, smarter, and therefore richer.

This month The Atlantic magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust.

Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition.

In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.”

By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.”

Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes?

Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder.

Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.”

Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda.

Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62).

Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy.

If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional.

If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used.

Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64).

The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded.

In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.

Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels.


In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility.

This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements.

This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society.

All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy.

Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially.

Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general.

Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class.

The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves.

Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty.

Mexico: Land of Dire Straits and Reaganomics

For more than the last four decades Mexicans have been risking their lives to migrate in larger numbers every year into the United States, escaping life below the poverty level and seeking better pay. Why has Mexico failed to develop its own people?

On September 23, 2009, according to the Los Angeles Times, a convoy of three vans packed with at least 76 Mexicans sped through the San Ysidro, California, border crossing, prompting police to open fire at the overloaded vehicles, making them crash. Police shut down the nation’s largest border check point, calling it a crime scene. All 76 immigrants were detained or arrested. Most of them will probably find a better method to enter the U.S. next time.

Every year, some half million Mexicans leave their families, communities, and towns to risk their lives trying to enter the U.S. Mostly they seek, at best, the U.S. minimum wage, which can mean as much as 40% more than what they might make in Mexico if they are lucky to find a job in their own country. Per year, they send more than a billion dollars back to their families in Mexico, who depend on the remittances to survive.

Is the U.S. to Blame for This Failure in Mexico?
Is the U.S. at least partly to blame for Mexico’s political and economic disaster? Or is America’s recent economic and military catastrophes the fault of some other country, such as Saudi Arabia or even Mexico? Who is the victim? Is Mexico some passive roadkill on the global highway? Not completely. Each country has its element of self-determination, otherwise what’s the point in calling it a sovereign country? But U.S. policies have pushed Mexico to the brink—and Mexico has returned the favor. The two countries dance to the same macabre song taking them both down.

How Could the U.S. Possibly Contribute to Mexico’s Failure?
The powerful forces of financial institutions, mostly influenced by the U.S.—like the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—have imposed neoliberal—Reaganomic—policies on third-world countries like Mexico. This argument stands on some solid ground, especially in light of cases like Chile, where the CIA supported a coup against the popular Allende regime in 1973 in order to prop up a government sympathetic to U.S. corporate interests.

The U.S. has applied such neoliberal colonizing tactics in many countries, though, without much success. Most recently, this process failed miserably in Iraq after an unprecedented preemptive bombing and invasion—motivated by the prospect of gaining access to the oil reserves (and justified falsely by claims of WMDs, terrorism, dictatorship, and other lame excuses). In carrying out these bellicose acts, the Bush-Cheney administration took neoliberal policies to a new extreme, what Naomi Klein calls the Shock Doctrine.

The term “neoliberalsm” can be confusing and misleading. Political strategists have presented economic liberalism, or neoliberalism, to the middle class in branding terms like “Reaganomics” or “Coca-Cola,” as if it were some friendly, good-tasting sugar-water as compared to “rightwing.” However, economic liberalism—neoliberalism—is rightwing and not friendly to the working class. Over the last forty years, it has shifted the distribution of wealth from the middle class to the elite wealthy class.

In some ways, the largely U.S.-promoted NAFTA program—a neoliberal policy—ultimately affected Mexico negatively as early as its first year, when wages dropped 40 to 50% while the cost of living rose by some 80%.

Likewise, NAFTA also affected the U.S. negatively by moving U.S. manufacturing jobs south of the border. At least in the short term, the cheaper blue collar labor in Mexico did help to maintain U.S. industry status quo and profits, especially the automobile sector. In the long run, though, cheap labor in Mexico was not enough to prop up a lagging, stogy industry that failed to innovate.

On the other hand, Japanese automakers now dominate the U.S. market because they constantly change. Japanese improvements and innovations (kaizen) include government supported developments of their own work force and adapting to market needs such as fuel-efficient vehicles.

The key determining factor is how U.S. policy makers –mostly neocons—drank pitchers full of Reaganomics (neoliberalism) like Kool-Aid. Japan did not implement neoliberal policies, which include relying on the notion of wealth trickling down from the rich and allegedly wise elite. Many of Japan’s industries are supported and guided by its government’s MITI (Minister of International Trade and Industry), which ensures that certain industries (keiretsu) dominate. Likewise, in Germany and France, government plays a key role in maintaining the social infrastructure (transportation, education, healthcare), and in maintaining a stable economy. On the other hand, in America, many political leaders present this type of policy as an evil socialism to be avoided like Satan.

Mexico Especially Vulnerable to Reaganomics
Reaganomics is merely a clever name for an economic policy that is much larger than the B-grade movie actor. Witty political strategists rebranded neoliberalism with the name Reaganomics because, during most of the 1980s, Reagan gained immense popularity among gullible groups of the American middle class. Using his name seemed like a great marketing ploy to promote policies that had little to do with benefiting the working classes. Little did many of Reagan’s fans know at the time that Ronald Reagan used his actor’s shoeshine-and-smile charm to sell an ideology that later would prove disastrous to the American people and cause the worst economic crisis in 2008 since the Great Depression, far surpassing the recession of 1979.

Although the mainstream media rarely uses the word “neoliberalism” in the U.S., anyone can see the effects of its policies today, which became widespread over the last thirty years. It is the direct cause of the massive failures in the U.S. financial system as well as extremely high rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, and foreclosures. Because of neoliberalism, we have seen drastic erosion of the middle class’s standard of living since the post-war boom, while the upper five percentile of the population, the elite plutocracy—CEOs, Senators, Congressmen—has greatly increased its wealth. In short, the rich became richer, the poor, poorer.

Conservative politicians—predominantly Republicans but also some Democrats—might say they hate “liberals”—the political liberals—while they love economic liberals or neoliberals. By using the word liberal in economics—the Milton Friedman type—political strategists manage to dupe many people with the confusing label.

The main tenets of neoliberalism are:

• Reducing or eliminating social services like education, healthcare, and other programs to avoid government involvement in maintaining a social infrastructure or the development of the middle class—and doing so while financially favoring large business entities. This destroys any sense of citizenry and civil rights as pressure is placed on the individual to “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The U.S. culture now has little sense of civility as many individuals believe that our society has to be a dog-eat-dog environment where they can become millionaires by working hard at Starbucks or in a cubicle and by aggressively and rudely competing in the workplace.


• In the 1980s Reagan became the poster boy of neoliberalism by cutting taxes and social benefits while loosening government regulations. At the same time, he increased defense spending by more than 40% during a rare period when the U.S. was not waging a war, although he could have invested that same 40% in education or healthcare and still stimulate the economy out of the recession. Reaganomics—neoliberalism—is socialism for the wealthy. Reagan’s policies to cut social services while financing the military-industrial complex only provided a huge government subsidy to defense contractors, infamous for their waste of tax money—the F-22 fighter jet being a more recent and blatant example. In doing so, Reagan gained credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed the communists over the edge. The mastermind behind U.S. support of the Afghan mujahideen’s resistance was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as humorously portrayed in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.


• Avoid government involvement in the social infrastructure. This is most blatant in how the Bush-Cheney administration granted no-bid contracts to private contractors, including Halliburton and, notably, Blackwater, whose mercenaries were sent to Iraq rather than doubling the number of U.S. military. This served to soften public opinion against the war by using uncounted, stealth soldiers. Today, we see how both Republican and Democratic Senators and Congressmen (e.g., Lieberman and Bayh), motivated by lobbyists and industry money, despise healthcare reform, especially the public option—a threat to the oligopolistic industry of private health insurance.
  


• Liberating private enterprise from regulations. The government could impose regulations in order to maintain the highest social benefits but instead, neoliberalism encourages hoarding profit among the lords of capitalism—the CEOs who garner millions in compensation—as was common during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s. The most recent example of this economic policy is allowing banks free rein to sell confusing balloon mortgages, which increased their profits in the short term while increasing costs over time to homeowners forced into foreclosure. This is the type of laissez-faire economics that was pervasive during the monarchies in Europe, benefiting mostly the royalty, feudal lords, and aristocracy. It was the main reason for the American Revolution, when “taxation without representation” was an operative slogan aimed against the ruling elites who collected the wealth while the workers toiled without any means to determine social policy through election. Today’s oligopolistic corporations in certain industries—such as petroleum, healthcare, banking, and defense—are merely the new fiefdoms of the feudal lords of our global economy.

Mexico has been particularly vulnerable to economic liberalism because monarchy ruled the country for centuries once the Spanish colonized the territory. The monarchy maintained a type of feudal economy in which many peasants worked the land and only the elite Spanish aristocracy owned or managed the land for the royalty. There was little or no social infrastructure for the peasants, the mixed bloods, or the native Indians.

In the last decades, Mexico’s government has implemented several neoliberal policies by privatizing many industries such as telecommunications, which has only allowed large corporations to grow into monopolies and their owners to become multibillionaires—a prime example being Carlos Slim Helu, owner of Mexico’s telecommunications, the world’s third richest man— while the middle class is left with few options other than to immigrate to the U.S. in search of sustainable wages. We can draw many parallels between old Mexico’s feudal economy and its more modern, large haciendas, where wealthy land owners profit from field workers and where large, unregulated corporations benefit at the expense of the greater social good.

Today’s neoliberalism has all the same economic policies as in old Mexico, where there was practically no social infrastructure to develop the poor, to educate them, to provide them with healthcare or programs to give them skills to expand the national economy and create a middle class or, at least, to help them plan their families—the number of children they can afford, despite the Catholic Church’s dogma prohibiting contraception.

Today, although Mexico benefits from some version of democracy with elected presidents, the government has become weak almost to the point of a failed state, especially since the drug lords operate much like the caudillos, regional leaders, whose centuries-long rule resembled the earlier Spanish feudal leaders.

Mexico’s first federal constitution was drafted in 1824, and the first president was elected. Nevertheless, just after Mexico first attempted to gain its independence from foreign monarchs, presidents appointed themselves into office, from Iturbide (1822, Constitutional Emperor) to Juarez (1867), who overthrew the empire that Emperor Napoleon III had established. “It was there that the future of the country would be determined, through military conspiracy, bribery of deputies, the rigging of elections, and the use of public money and institutions to back electoral campaigns” (Mexico by E. Krauze, p. 130). These traditions of corruption continue to the present, and the large haciendas of the old Mexico still exist like remnants of its feudal past.

Neoliberal policies carry on many of the same practices of the monarchy and the hacienda—based economies. Mexico’s President Calderon recently moved to privatize the central electrical utility in Mexico City, breaking up the labor union, a tactic to reduce labor costs and to increase profits for private investors.

"There's no doubt that Light and Power is an inefficient company," said John Ackerman, professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "But the fact that he has decided to go against the union that historically most clearly represents the achievements of union rights and the left in Mexico is very much a political decision."

In explaining the company's losses, Ackerman pointed out that Mexico City and its surrounding areas are the most industrial in the country but harbor a huge informal economy, in which pirating electricity is common.

“The revolutionary intent of the Mexican people, now as then, has not changed. It is a desire for the distribution of the land and resources of Mexico among the Mexican people.” This is one of the observations John Steinbeck made in the 1950s when he researched the story of Zapata for his first and only movie script—a 20-year project. Despite a dramatic history of attempts to revolt against oppressive traditions in Mexico, little progress has been made.

So long as Mexico remains stuck in its feudal, plutocratic traditions, it will never develop its people and pull itself out of its own trap of greedy caudillos, be they church leaders, politicians, drug lords or entrepreneurs and military generals.
Something similar can be said of the U.S., which too often slips into its own self-destructive periods from the Gilded Age to today’s Bailout Age.