King of Spain mutant US President

One can read too much into the unprecedented rude behaviour and abrupt departure of Juan Carlos, Bourbon King of Spain, during the recent Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. Clearly, when he got up and left in the middle of Daniel Ortega's lucid analysis of international relations, after first telling Hugo Chavez to shut his mouth, he was simply leaving in order to shape-shift discreetly back into George W. Bush. "What else explains the astonishing fall of the United States and its European and Pacific allies into ancien regime corrupt decay and relative decline? "The President of the United States is the Bourbon King of Spain. Obvious, once you think about it really ....

Ancien regime leaders like President Bush, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union NATO ventriloquist-dummy Javier Solana have now bumped up hard against the limits of their imperialist regime's economic power and environmental sustainability. Their overwhelming economic dominance no longer goes unchallenged. Their countries' own natural resources are almost exhausted. Like any other empire in decline they are more than ready to use military power to hold on to what they want.

Reading headlines at random in mid-November, one finds: "Bank's grim warning over UK economy"(Guardian November 15th) , "Europe will use tariffs in subsidy fight with China" (FT November 15th), "OPEC refuses to increase supplies despite US plea" (FT November 15th), "Japan's exposure to an external shock remains"(FT November 15th), "All signals pointing in the direction of a US slowdown" (FT November 15th), "EU must be prepared to use military power"(Guardian November 15th).

The vast anti-humanitarian, corporate-welfare globalization scam has ended up as little more than a faltering cheap credit boom facilitating rich-country multinational control of worldwide resources and markets to feed destructive, exclusive, parasitic "growth". The "war on terror" - and the pathetic failure of international corporate media to give a true and fair view of their political and economic leaders' accounts - are directly related to the relative economic decline of the ancien regime of the US elite and their allies.

The dead hand of die-hard feudalism

At the same time as the ancien regime is targetting Iran on the hypocritical, bogus pretext of nuclear weapons concerns (apparently inapplicable to nuclear rogue-State and multiple UN-Resolutions recidivist Israel), they are yet again actively destabilising Venezuela. Both Iran and Venezuela are key allies in their respective regions of Russia and China, the ancien regime's major global challengers. Russia and China have earmarked tens of billions of dollars for joint investment in energy and manufacturing projects in Iran and Venezuela. Both are important energy suppliers to China.

Apart from the economic links between those countries, they are also committed politically to building a multi-polar world. The US government and its craven allies, peeping out and name-calling from behind overwhelming US military power, now face having to negotiate access to global resources as equals. The ancien regime countries' leaders will never willingly accept that. Until now, their wishes have always come true, as and when made.

To understand their mentality it may be handy to look again at shape-shifting mutant Head of State, Juan Carlos W. Bush. King Juan Carlos was not Generalissimo Franco's preferred heir for nothing. The Bush family's proto-fascist pedigree before and during World War 2 is also well known. For such people and their peers, democracy is an inconvenient facade to be circumvented whenever possible.

They believe fervently they are the natural inheritors of the earth and everything on it not owned by legitimate people - people like themselves. Their mental landscape is a feudal demesne where seigneurial rights prevail. Colonialism expanded that mentality to take in the natural resources of whole countries and peoples. For the ancien regime, those revert to the natural inheritors, the global elites, by right of mortmain.

Indigenous and colonized peoples around the world live this reality every day. They are forever treated as if they belong to a vast global class of serfs - homines manus mortuez. They are deemed people without the right to make a will, their goods and property passing as of right to be disposed of by the global corporate elite and the elite's political factotums.

Palestine is the archetypal modern example of this truth. Neo-liberal ideology is profoundly colonialist but perhaps, at bottom, feudal. Privatization, deregulation of capital markets, anti-humanitarian budget cuts - all derive ultimately from the idea that an inferior majority exists only to serve the needs of a small, greedy aristocracy. The fraudulent, corporate monopoly capitalism equation "free markets = democracy" has always been a total hoax.

This is the cheating, carpet-bagger instinct driving Nicolas Sarkozy in his current efforts to strip away pension rights won after bitter conflicts by generations of French workers while Sarkozy's elite, systemically corrupt, financial and business euro-buddies walk off with spuriously-won bonuses of tens of millions of Euros. The elite must be guaranteed their perquisites. The masses must live out their old age in want. The same logic drove Gordon Brown's abysmal failure to improve public services in the UK while he and Tony Blair had no trouble organising the criminal wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Global war on the poor

Now the destructive internal logic of corporate globalization is compounded by many diverse kinds of resistance throughout the disinherited majority world. The level of conflict may vary, but it is hard to think of a region in the world where murderous, corporate globalization is not facing determined resistance. In such a context, for the corporate aristocracy, the prioritization of a military and economic assault on Iran and relentless efforts to destabilize the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) countries in Latin America makes plenty of sense.

Members of the multinational corporate elite that own and operate the G-7 imperialist Thing know very well that the biggest threat to their system is not China or Russia or other large countries like Brazil and India. Those countries' respective elites can well be relied on to play some version or other of the globalization "free market" three card trick, via kickbacks of all kinds, including a slice of the global protection racket known as the UN Security Council. What the global corporate elite and their political front-persons probably fear most is the combination by former colonies determined to defeat once and for all the structures of neo-colonialism imposed since the Second World War.

That is why they hate the Iranian and Venezuelan leaders with such venom. It is why they are determined to destroy the Iranian revolution, to defeat the indigenous movement in Bolivia, the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Socialist Revolution in Cuba. The four ALBA countries have persistently declared their interest in fomenting South-South economic cooperation with African and Asian countries to defend the rights of their peoples to self-determination against the imperialist powers.

Now that Ecuador and Angola are OPEC members (along with Iran, Venezuela, Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Indonesia, Lybia, Iraq, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia), the capacity of these countries to defend their economies against the collapse of the dollar will be greater. But it is absolutely clear that the US and the European Union will continue to manage the current international economic and political crisis to destroy the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and to destabilize more vulnerable Latin American countries like Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador. They will use the usual mixture of economic sabotage, political pressure, military intimidation, corporate media saturation propaganda and interventionist covert action.

Exploiting the crisis

In the report below the above headlined Bank of England's gloomy prognosis for the UK economy, the bank's governor is quoted as saying that things will begin to get better in 2009. That is the year Latin America's main electoral round begins. What Mervyn King is saying is that demand for raw materials in the G-7 countries will slump for the next two years. That will have knock on effects in the China and India - also huge consumers of Latin American raw materials.

To that slump in demand can be added already rising inflation in Latin American dollar zone countries. Countries like Nicaragua and its Central American neighbours pay for all their imports in dollars. As the dollar collapses, prices in the economies of such countries will rise relentlessly. Undoubtedly, this is part of the US-led rich-country programme to destroy support for progressive political movements in Latin America. People will soon get disenchanted with radical movements for change if they cannot afford to buy staple foods like maize, rice and beans or to pay bus fares to get to work and to school.

Over the next three years, we will all be able to see how completely bogus is the rich-country commitment to the Millenium Goals - halving numbers living in poverty by 2015. A consistent rich country response in line with that commitment to cut poverty would include wide-spread, well-coordinated measures to assist the economies of vulnerable countries in the Latin America dollar zone. That initiative will either never happen or will be framed in the usual discredited neo-liberal, heavily conditioned, do-what-we-want-or-else terms habitual to the US government and its allies.

The next three years are likely to be decisive in the final liberation - or its failure - of Latin America's peoples from domination by foreign imperialist powers. By the end of 2010 we will see whether the profoundly humanitarian vision of the ALBA country model of equitable trade, prioritizing social needs over corporate profit prevails. The alternative for the impoverished majority and the continent's indigenous peoples will be endless impoverishment and serfdom subject to the whims of mutant ancien regime royalty, King Juan Carlos W. Bush or Queen Isabella Clinton and their cortege of rotten global corporate aristocracy.

In truth, there are only two sides to what is unmistakeably a global class conflict. When George W. Bush said, notoriously, "either with us or against us", he could not have been more right. Either one is with the death-dealing, destructive, unsustainably-greedy global elite or one is with the vast majority of the world's peoples who want, simply, a sustainable decent life. One is either on the side of ordinary people or of the seigneurial global elite - on the side of humanity or of inhumanity.

Toni Solo is an activist based in Central America - http://toni.tortillaconsal.com

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