Towards the Unconditional Return of All Tribal Lands

After over 500 years of European rule in the Americas and about 100 years after the last of the "wild" Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee, 150 in all including women and children, the tide may finally be turning for the Indigenous people of these lands.

Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was recently elected to the presidency of Bolivia and has proposed a new constitution which would recognize the rights of the country's indigenous population to their tribal lands including natural resources (this is what really frightens the avaricious oligarchs in the wealthier provinces of the country -- not the lifting of term limits so often publicized by the U.S. news media which is actually not uncommon in many of Europe's democracies).

At the same time, further north, representatives of the Lakota Sioux Indians (including three veteran A.I.M. activists who were at Wounded Knee during the 1973 takeover) have declared independence from the U.S. citing years of treaty violations and other grievances. The delegation has already met with representatives of the Bolivian government which has expressed interest in the Lakota Sioux cause.

Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Venezuela Blows Up the D.E.A.'s Spot

Estaban haciendo una gran cantidad de traslado de droga bajo la figura de entrega vigilada... nosotros pudimos determinar que estábamos en presencia evidentemente de un nuevo cartel (they were making a large quantity of drug shipments under the pretense of monitoring them.. we were able to determine the presence of a new drug cartel).Pedro Carreño, Minister of the Interior, Venezuela

Last year I wrote about the the so-called "War on Drugs" in Latin America and how it is in fact a cover for the U.S.'s drug wars to protect its financial interest in cocaine trafficking. What I neglected to mention was that the U.S.'s drug wars are part of a political strategy as well. Fortunately Chavez's government called the U.S. out on this issue earlier this month in response to criticism from the White House that Venezuela was not cooperating with the U.S. in curbing cocaine smuggling. Minister of the Interior Pedro Carreño explained to the Associated Press that his government ended its cooperation with the U.S. D.E.A. in 2005 because the agency wasn't making any arrests or smashing any cartels. Instead it was smuggling huge amounts of blow through the country. In effect the D.E.A. was itself operating as a drug cartel. Morever the authorities in Venezuela discovered that the U.S. D.E.A. had infiltrated government intelligence agencies and represented a threat to national security. Thus it would appear that the U.S. D.E.A. serves two functions: (a) as a an instrument of espionage it serves to protect U.S. strategic political interests; and (b) as an enforcement agency it serves to protect the U.S.'s financial interest in cocaine trafficking.

The War On Drugs (Revisited)

Acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously, the poetic state, a transcendant state of life, is fundamentally what the public seeks through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.

-- Antonin Artaud

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

-- Ernest Hemingway

From New York to Tehran the world is getting high, high, high. Why? That's a rhetorical question isn't it? Why can't we all just get high on life? Let's face it: if life were a drug, it would be rubbing alcohol. It may get you a little drunk sometimes but, ultimately, it's just going to make you go blind or just kill you. For most people in this world, life is about figuring out where the next meal's coming from and for most of the rest it's about drudgery. We spend our time circulating commodities -- consuming them, manufactuiring them and selling them even though some of us wake up to the painful realization that we ourselves have become mere commodities, merely means by which this absurd machine perpetuates its murderous existence. So we get tipsy, twisted and tight trying to attain that sweet perfection that eludes us when sober. We look for the sublime through the eye of a hypodermic needle or try to inhale it -- hot, dry and ethereal -- through the stem of a glass pipe. But let me tell you, I checked and double-checked, baby I've done research and nobody ever found nirvana between the folds of a glassine envelope. Nobody ever found paradise at the bottom of a brandy snifter. What drugs provide is simulation and, as with all simulacra, you have to pay. Drugs are money, they cost money, and the high you get from them is the manifestation not of creativity, not of the reality that makes us all live but of the qualitative experience of a discrete quantity of money. And as with all money, someone had to die for those drugs, someone like the people of Afghanistan and Colombia. So to escape the misery of life in the Babylon system we took drugs and by taking those drugs we only augmented our complicity in the system that creates our misery. The same system that provides those drugs to slake our appetite for the sublime while securing surplus cash-flows and circumventing insurrection. Still we get no satisfaction. Instead we have crime, drugs and war ... and with so little love left in the world, maybe it's time we tried an insurrection.

"Ayer Vine El Diablo Aqui"

Okay. I don't care what anybody says -- Hugo Chavez is ill. He called George Bush the devil in front of the whole world, crossed himself and said it still smelled like sulfur! And people applauded and laughed. Keep in mind that the audience is not supposed to respond to speeches made before the General Assembly of the United Nations -- but people laughed and clapped anyway. He then went on to denounce U.S. imperialism and the continuing military violence perpetuated by the U.S. against the people of the South. I encourage anyone who reads or understands Spanish to check out the text of this speech or to watch the video. The English translation will hopefully be made available soon for those who don't. Chavez just said what the rest of the world's leaders were thinking but didn't have the balls to say. I.e. that the people of the world are not down with the program of U.S. imperialism.

Rebellion in Oaxaca!

In May the teachers in Oaxaca staged a massive strike in response to the Governor's refusal to raise funding for teachers and rural schools. See he needed those funds to keep his and his friends' pockets nice and fat. His response to the strikers was three thousand pigs who proceeded to beat the people down -- sending over one hundred people to the hospital. So then the people got organized and really got down. In June they formed the Asamblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca (APPO) out of regional and municipal organizations, unions, non-governmental organizations, social organizations, cooperatives and parent groups and took over the center of Oaxaca city. Isn't it amazing what the people can accomplish when they get it on and show they ass? The New York Times doesn't think so. That rag finally reported these events yesterday only to decry the protesters' violence (not the pigs') and to echo the Governor's call for Federal intervention! In other words, in all seriousness, the fucking hypocrite was denouncing the violence of the People while advocating more violence on the part of the State. Meanwhile, the Governor has been sending out paramilitary units to murder protesters. All the Times reporter was really concerned about were the fucking tourists trapped in their hotels. You gotta love how traumatized these bourgeois fucks get when confronted with actual Democracy and Freedom!

The War on Drugs

First of all there is no war on drugs -- there is a drug war. Second of all the U.S. is not trying to stop the production and traffic in cocaine and heroin -- it's simply trying to maintain control of the racket. This should be obvious to anyone who read Juan Forero's excellent report on the front page of Saturday's New York Times. Naturally you had to read the entire article to get the entire picture but it's something like this. The U.S. has spent the past six years and $ 4.7 billion supposedly trying to eradicate cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia. However production and price have remained pretty much the same as they were before Clinton launched the program (yes -- this is a Clinton program). And, the reporter mentions at the very end of the piece, the effort has had the effect of furnishing the control of the drug trafficking routes to the right-wing paramilitary commanders instead of the left-wing insurgents. Is it just me or is this just so obviously a racket that you just want to go fucking nuts? Basically the U.S. sent the military into Colombia to wipe out the traffic in blow only they didn't wipe it out -- they just shook down the competition. Now you've got the degenerate children of the U.S. and international bourgeoisie living it up in the night clubs of Los Angeles and New York City run run running to the yayo while U.S. prisons fill up with Black and Latino men who got pinched for allegedly hustling relatively tiny quantities of dope while the U.S. military is maintaining a Civil War in Colombia to keep that coke money flowing. Because it is all about the money. Every year between $ 500 billion and one trillion dollars of drug money is laundered through U.S. banks and companies [see US Senate, (1999); Minority Staff Report for Permanent Sub committee on Investigations, US Senate Committee on Government Affairs, November 9, 1999 and US Senate, (2001); Minority Staff Report for Permanent Sub committee on Investigations on Correspondent Banking: A Gateway for Money Laundering, Senate Committee on Government Affairs, February 5, 2001]. It is this continuous flow of cash money that has kept the U.S. stock market strong despite the dwindling competitiveness of U.S. companies in the world market. Nothing helps financial liquidity like an annual influx of several hundred billion dollars in cash. The leftist insurgents (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) plan to decriminalize the production of coca once in power. Legal proceeds don't need laundering. So Uncle Sam's got to move against them.

Cuba Before The Revolution

For about 20 years, from 1939 until the revolution in January 1959, Cuba was run by gangsters. Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Santos Trafficante, Jr. owned the Havana casinos and Fulgencio Batista or whomever was president got his cut. Havana was the location of the notorious Havana Conference -- one of the most important meetings in the history of organized crime in the U.S. The list of attendees reads like a "Who's Who" of the syndicate at the time -- all the original leaders of New York's five families and their closest associates were there -- Bumpy Johnson was there too. Cuba is the link between the Kennedy assassination and the mob. The syndicate, represented at the time by Trafficante, was furious that Kennedy failed to support the Bay of Pigs invasion with the Air Force and the Marines (among other things) even though the latter were stationed offshore and ready to land at a moment's notice. Jose Aleman (Cuban exile and F.B.I. stool pigeon), in his testimony before the U.S. Senate, said that Trafficante told him that Kennedy was going to get hit.