US capitalism always and only interested in land and profit

[questionnaire]

We all know that Native Americans were systematically killed off inorder to make way for the "white man". The demonization of the red man -- portraying him as a heathen savage -- was the propaganda component of this genocide campaign. As recently as the 1950s, American films continued to embody this race-hatred perspective -- Indians were universally portrayed as whooping, drunken, savages, intent only on killing innocent pioneers.



Audiences still cheered in the 50s whenever another redskin bit the dust, and when the cavalry rode in to finish them off in the last reel. "The only good Injun is a dead Injun" was an oft-repeated slogan, familiar

to generations of children whose favorite outdoor game was "Cowboys and Indians".



Now we have films like "Dancing With Wolves", and we all feel we're so much more humane now, so much more sympathetic to noble savages -- all that nasty business was of a long-gone age.



The fact is that there are places in Central America and Brazil, for example, where men are still hired to go out with rifles and shoot all the natives in whatever area is next slated for development, for agribusines or whatever. In the U.S., the government used to pay $2 for each Indian scalp (little ones accepted as well) that was brought in, and people who might otherwise be hunting animals for sport would track down and kill Indian families instead, and get a little extra cash in the

bargain.



What it's all about is simply land-use patterns. Any group of people who live self-sufficently on a bit of land are an intrusion on capitalist development -- they are wasting valuable land. One of the frequent scenarios of Westward Expansion was the following. A land

speculator would gain title to a tract of Indian land, and then resell it to a large number of would-be pioneers, at a great profit. Eventually the Army would come in to clear off the natives, while the speculator would be repeating the scenario a few miles further west.



NAFTA, in its effect on rural Mexico, is in fact a modern version of this same phenomenon. In order for NAFTA to be approved by the U.S., a key demand was that Mexico renounce its own Constitution, which guaranteed

that tracts of land be reserved for native use. NAFTA serves as a "land-use-license", and American agribusiness now sees itself as entitled to buy up and develop native lands.



That is what the Chiapas uprising is all about, and this time it's the Mexican army who's got the job of clearing the land for these modern, large-scale U.S. land developers. The practice of killing off the natives,

clearing the land for capital development, has in fact continued right up to the present day -- the frontier is simply further away, and not the subject of popular Western-Romance mythology -- so we don't notice it.



Now that the entire globe is being brought under a neoliberal Corporatist Order, one must notice that Black Africa stands out as a huge tract of fertile land that is being wasted by primitive usage patterns. Some is occupied by subsistence-economy natives, and some is even given over to be roamed by wild animals! (remember the Amerian Buffalo?) What a waste, in the eyes of the global bankers.



Each region of the world is being assaulted by the corporatist New World Order in a customized way. In the First World, downsizing, privatization, "free trade", and deregulation are dismantling democratic institutions so that later phases of corporate feudalism can be implemented more readily. In the former Soviet sphere, massive destabilization is being employed to reduce the societies to rubble, so that the whole region can become a zone for unrestricted capital development. In most of the Third World, IMF policies are systematically tightening the noose of capital exploitation around the necks of whole populations.