The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: On Mexico and US Banks

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Mexican Standoff • Dean Borok A lot of people are very unhappy about our border with Mexico. A couple of years ago the complaint was about Mexicans sneaking into the U.S. in search of jobs. Now there are no jobs. Feel better? Now the great fear is about narco-violence spilling across the border. Mexican bandidos are killing each other, police, soldiers and innocent bystanders at the rate of 7-8,000 per year. This is a very insalubrious situation, and it needs to be addressed.

If the U.S. legalized marijuana it would remove one of the smugglers’ stock items, the same way that ending alcohol prohibition eliminated alcohol smuggling from Canada in the 1930’s. Now the descendents of the alcohol smugglers are among our most revered citizens. Any time you have borders, you have problems. Europe has for millennia indulged in a round robin of national, sectarian and religious violence, as have Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Central American republics of Honduras and El Salvador once engaged in a savage, bloody war over a soccer match.

Fundamentally, people are no better than packs of apes or wild dogs, capable of switching from acts of incredible culture and refinement one minute to behaving like marauding army ants the next. The sooner we confront the beast within ourselves, like a demon or Jack the Ripper, the sooner we can mobilize our formidable resources to eliminate him. We have declared war on malaria, cholera and other scourges while turning a blind eye on what is arguably the greatest threat to public health, human aggression. The U.S. has been mostly spared the destructive fury of other nations because we have been isolated from the other large landmasses by oceans. We only have two neighbors, which are both weak. But with delivery systems and weapons becoming increasingly sophisticated, our sense of security is starting to break down, and certain citizens are freaking out about North Korea, Iran and Pakistan.

Pearl Harbor and 9/11 proved that a determined adversary can wreak havoc right here on American soil, though both were partly due to our own government’s lackadaisical standard of vigilance. Conflict with Mexico has existed since the European immigrants, invited by that country to populate its Texas territory, aided by American adventurers and chafing at Mexico’s prohibition against slavery, rebelled and established the Texas Republic. Soon after, the administration of President Polk manufactured a bogus pretext for invading Mexico and forcing it to cede 50% of its territory in the biggest land grab in the history of the world, fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – that it was our manifest destiny to have a contiguous territory from sea to shining sea. I’m not complaining. God Bless America.
I dig having Route 66 stretching all the way from Chicago to the Santa Monica pier. We certainly made good use of it.

Three years after we expropriated it we discovered gold in California". An equivalent today would be the Chinese flooding into Siberia and taking half of it, which has obviously occurred to the Russian Kremlin, because they have announced a project to spend $200 billion, which translates into a lot of rubles, to upgrade their military, and it’s doubtful that they feel threatened by the U.S. or Europe. Mexican-U.S. relations across the modern border have always been problematical, but mostly the threat has come from our side.

In the 1880’s the Arizona Territory was infested by what were then derisively referred to as “cowboys”. These cowboys were not simple cowpunchers sitting around the campfire playing “Red River Valley” on their harmonicas. “Cowboy” was the term applied to itinerant gangsters, killers and livestock rustlers. When the great American chronicler of the old west, Louis L’Amour, wrote that the country “was not built by good men alone”, he was referring to these bastards, who constituted such a threat to life and property that even to this day Arizona society retains a vestigial hardened revulsion toward criminality and threats to public order. One specialty of these cowboys was to mount raids across the border into Mexico, where they would slaughter ranchers and drive their herds of livestock back into the States, where they sold them in industrial quantities to American wholesalers. Not that they just preyed on Mexicans. Any victim would do. Cowboy gangs were sufficiently strong and numerous that they terrorized the whole territory and inhibited investment by legitimate enterprises. They created such a state of insurrection that the territorial governor, John C. Fremont, requested the legislature to form a militia to attack and eradicate them.

The Arizona Star newspaper adopted an editorial policy that called for the cowboys to be slaughtered without mercy: “The organization of a volunteer company of one hundred men to hunt them down or drive them out of the territory must evidently end with failures, from the fact that the cowboys are too strong for such a small force, and in a pitched fight would undoubtedly come out victorious, which would result in making the matters ten-fold worse than at present. We either must have a strong force for the work or not attempt it at all. It has been suggested that two companies of United States Cavalry be sent out to the section where the outlaws camp and stay after them… until they be forced to leave the territory or fight for their ground”. Unfortunately, Fremont could not convince the legislature to fund the enterprise and his initiative collapsed. They didn’t want to spend the money, reasoning that the U.S. Army was available to do the job at no cost to them. This failure to act by the legislature motivated the ranchers, who were being terrorized worse than the Mexicans were, to form a vigilante committee, which hung several rustlers. In the meantime, the rustlers assassinated several lawmen.

U.S. President Chester A. Arthur ordered the U.S. military to intervene: “It has been made to appear satisfactorily to me that it has become impracticable to enforce, by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, the laws of the United States within that Territory, and that the laws therein have been forcibly opposed, and the execution thereof forcibly resisted, and whereas the laws of the United States require whenever necessary in the judgment of the President, to use military force”.

In the meantime, the cowboys continued to terrorize the territory by means of robbery, mayhem and murder. The only policeman to stand up to them was Tombstone Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp who, with his brothers and Doc Holliday, shot down the cowboy gang run by the Clanton brothers at the OK Corral. So this cross-border terrorism has deep roots in history on both sides. It might subside for a few years, but the ordinary distortions and contradictions of international intercourse will eventually manifest themselves in forms of conflict. The ancient civilization of Mexico can no more collapse because of the behavior of a relative handful of gangsters than the U.S. could be brought down by the bedlam initiated by an insignificant group of renegade cowboys. We are at least fortunate that in Secretary of State Clinton we have in authority a personage who will not abandon her composure should she happen to come under small arms fire.

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Banky-Panky
                                                                              
Boo-hoo-hoo! Let me shed a tear for the poor, misunderstood bankers. All those years they were raking it in and people were mesmerized: these guys are geniuses, they figured out the art of alchemy, they are truly great humanitarians for creating so much value! It turns out they didn’t know shit. All their robbing of Peter to pay Paul came unraveled and, as usual, the emperor had no clothes.

As one Warren Buffett put it, when the tide goes out you find out who was swimming without a bathing suit. So now the cupboard is bare, and everybody is cleaned out. All the money went up in a puff of smoke.

Not really. It has to be in somebody’s bank accounts. But we’ll get to that further on down the road. In the meantime, the bankers are screaming like stuck pigs because public opinion is insisting that banks that are receiving taxpayer bailouts must put a lid on the amount of compensation that can be looted by their corporate officers. They are insisting that if they can’t be allowed to continue steal, they will dig in their heels, refuse to cooperate and impede the flow of credit into the general economy. Presently at stake is whether banks should be forced to write down the hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless derivatives they hold for what they are worth (nothing) or whether the government should be forced to buy the derivatives at their face value and bail out bank equity holders. This is pure power politics, and the bankers are used to winning.

For years they have been fighting against what they term “entitlements” for ordinary people like medical and unemployment insurance as “fiscal irresponsibility”. Translated into plain English that meant they were afraid it would come out of their share of the pie. Or, more plainly, it would mean less for them to steal. Wall Street has just as much, or more, of a sense of entitlements, only instead of food stamps it entails yachts, private jets and mansions. Try to separate the bankers from their entitlements, and they will literally go insane with rage. Capitalism, as it’s practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world, implies an unsentimental approach to other people’s interests. It’s pure power politics taken to the Darwinian level of survival of the fittest.

This approach, while it may be appropriate for flesh-eating Comoro dragons in the jungles of Borneo, is not suitable for sophisticated human social organisms. Therefore banks, like any other economic structures, must be submitted to the same regulatory constraints as mineral extraction or food production, as a component of social organization. The banks are chafing against Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s proposal that they be compelled to put aside larger reserves against losses, because every dollar which must be added to reserves is a dollar out of their pockets. They are resisting regulation of swap deals which, as AIG demonstrated, swaps are just another term for wholesale stealing. Regulation of swaps, where reserves would have to be set aside against wagers, will effectively kill the whole derivatives industry. Fine, if their approach is “my way or the highway”, let the banks go under!

Let the Treasury Department set up a new public bank, run by ethical civil servants, to serve as a model for a new banking system that operates in the public interest. Bankers are crying in fear and blaming the whole uproar on populist sentiment. And what is populism? It is public opinion that is not based upon manipulation by society’s elite. Populism is a boat that has been cut loose from its moorings and is now floating out of control.

In past generations the system has found a way to safely ground populist opinion and tie it safely back to the dock. Only now there is no dock. There is no establishment structure in place to contain public opinion. There is only instability. Barack Obama cannot control it. Two or three more months down the line, his ceaseless interventions in the media will become irrelevant because he cannot count on the Democrats in congress to support him. As for the Republicans, they are meaningless. Obama is revealing himself to be a continuation of Bush, who assumed power expecting to govern on the basis of continuity, and was swamped by events beyond his comprehension. When Obama promised “change” he was anticipating a period of relative stability where he would be able to tinker around the edges of the system. Unfortunately, in both cases these politicians were inundated by a series of events that were beyond their comprehension.

A Russian intelligence analyst, Igor Panarin, is predicting the imminent break-up of the United States. He may not be too far off the mark. The country is in a pre-revolutionary situation similar to Weimar Germany or the Kerensky Social Democratic regime that ran Russia until the Russian revolution. Before Americans begin crowing about Mexico being brought to disintegration by a few narco-terrorists, it should look to its own backyard. We can rule out a military takeover like that of General Franco in Spain, because the bulk of our military is extended halfway around the world in Iraq. But ultimately, new leadership is beginning to arise at the street level, like in France where young radical socialist Oliver Besançanot is gaining prominence that rivals that of president Nicolas Sarkozy. Populist sentiment is notoriously unstable. It tends to gravitate to authoritarian right-wing solutions. A lot depends on the personal magnetism of the leadership. Americans, not being grounded in ideological theology, could go either way. During the Depression of the 1930’s populist sentiment tended to gravitate to Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who presented a left-wing economic agenda, Every Man a King, with a right-wing personal style. Until he was assassinated.

© Dean Borok April 2009
deanyorkave@yahoo.com

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