The Next Mexican Revolution

Don't Look Now, But It's Already Started

The Next Mexican Revolution

By JOHN ROSS
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross09212010.html

Also in the revolutionary mix are an unknown number of anarchist cells, at least one of which takes the name of Praxides G. Guerrero, the first anarchist to fall 100 years ago in the Mexican revolution. Primarily operating in urban settings, anarchist cells have firebombed dozens of ATM machines and banks, new car showrooms, bullrings, and slaughterhouses (many anarchists are militant vegans) in Mexico City, Mexico state, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, and Tijuana. The U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has just added Mexican anarchist groups to the Obama government's terrorist lists.

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Leftists who have been awaiting a more "political" uprising in 2010 are not convinced by Buscaglia's nomenclature. A real revolution must be waged along ideological and class lines which the narco-insurrection has yet to manifest. Nonetheless, given the neo-liberal mindset of a globalized world in which class dynamics are reduced to market domination, the on-going narco-insurrection may well be the best new Mexican revolution this beleaguered nation is going to get.

No Longer the "Consumer of Last Resort"?

Asia: The Coming Fury

by Walden Bello

This process [export led growth] depended on the U.S. market. As long as U.S. consumers splurged, the export economies of East Asia could continue in high gear. The low U.S. savings rate was no barrier since credit was available on a grand scale. China and other Asian countries snapped up U.S. treasury bills and loaned massively to U.S. financial institutions, which in turn loaned to consumers and homebuyers. But now the U.S. credit economy has imploded, and the U.S. market is unlikely to serve as the same dynamic source of demand for a long time to come. As a result, Asia's export economies have been marooned....

U.S.-East Asia economic relations today resemble a chain-gang linking not only China and the United States but a host of other satellite economies. They are all linked to debt-financed middle-class spending in the United States, which has collapsed....

In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label "mass group incidents," which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.

A Revolution of Rising Expectations

(Artwork: Ben Heine)

My friend and neighbor Dan Hamburg points out the immense challenges facing the new president, and warns:

He must produce. If Clinton faced deficits, Obama faces chasms. Military quagmires. A broken health care system. Public education in shambles. Unprecedented income inequality, and an economy on life-support.

If in two years Obama voters feel cheated, their high hopes unfulfilled, there will be hell to pay--for the Democrats, but more importantly, for the country.

Here is an interesting blast from the past that offers some insight on the present:

"What was Barack Obama like in 1990?" (a story from February 1990 on Obama becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review)

Red State Rebels

Yikes! The levy may not hold....