The view of the world from a European outpost is not encouraging. Even
though the French and the Dutch voted NO to the Treaty for the European
Constitution (TEC), there is no telling how far that NO is going to take
us, given the worldwide power of the corporate empire that rules the
planet.
In accordance with GATS,
the General Agreement on Trade and Services, the goal of of the TEC
was to spread the gospel of free trade and services with impunity and with
the hope that the people who were concerned are not going to figure out
the well-hidden message.
Most governments are well anchored to the power house represented by the
multinational corporations. They all seem to be lined up to compete in
getting the lion's share of the booty when the resources of the planet are
being divvied up between the plunderers.
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.
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
