The Cartels: Colonization, Capital, & Collapse (Part Two)

I've said it many times. What is being done to The United States right now to large, portions of the population in The United States is what The United States Of America did to the rest of the world. The toolkit is identical. Look at it. Structural adjustment, the IMF, the World Bank, their formula was imposed on global South nations throughout the nineteen eighties, throughout the nineteen nineties, and ever since.

That was privatization of public assets, that was austerity measures, cuts to social services and so forth, elimination of subsidies, deregulation deregulation of capital, debt restructuring that transferred all sovereign resources into the hands of the creditor institutions. Does that sound familiar? It may not because you haven't been it hasn't been framed for you like this, what's happening to you. But the same thing is happening to American communities, for the last twenty years without the IMF branding. Look at Flint, Michigan and their water infrastructure.

That was, structurally adjusted. Detroit went through a managed bankruptcy. They transferred all of their public assets to private creditors over the objection of the population. Does that sound familiar? That's Detroit getting the, Global South treatment.

The opioid crisis in the Appalachian communities, well, that's indistinguishable economically from the manufactured crack epidemic in the urban black communities in the nineteen eighties. You're talking about a chemically addictive substance that somehow floods a deindustrialized economically abandoned population, and that generates enormous profits for the supply chain, and more importantly, it produces social destabilization that justifies increased security expenditure and incarceration infrastructure. You understand? The pharmaceutical companies, the same pharmaceutical companies that produced and marketed OxyContin knew what they were doing. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Just as the people who engineered the flow of crack into the inner cities, into inner city communities knew what they were doing. The supply chain maybe is different, maybe, but the structural logic is identical. Addicted, destabilized populations don't organize. They don't organize. They don't build institutions.

They don't challenge power. You've all read the economic hitman, book, I suppose. I always get that in the comment section. People mentioning that book by John Perkins. Well, that works through inflated infrastructure arraignments that create debt dependency create debt dependency.

It works on contracts that benefit external corporations, external corporations rather than local labor. It works on resource extraction that repatriates profits while externalizing costs, and political capture political capture of local lead leadership political leadership through corruption or through coercion. Okay. This is the same precise model that applies to post industrial American cities. The same thing's happening in your cities.

The renaissance of Detroit, the renaissance of Baltimore, these cities, whatever example you wanna go, it always involves real estate developers, tax increment financing, the benefits external capital, you know, sports stadiums, mega projects, or whatever. They they they get built by public subsidy while the underlying population remains completely impoverished. This is the same thing. Banana Republic. You understand?

It's Banana Republic dynamic. That's where a country's political class becomes so completely financially integrated and absorbed within external capital that they can no longer represent in any way whatsoever their own population's interest. This is America. This is America. The revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the treasury department, between Raytheon and the Pentagon, between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA.

That's capture. These are the same capture mechanisms that produced the the the Comprador, the corrupt Comprador classes in so called Latin American states. When it happens elsewhere, you call it corruption. When it happens in your country, when you do it yourself, you call it freedom and democracy. Look, America is not becoming like a colony.

America is becoming a colony. The colonizing power just doesn't fly a flag. They have a collection of logos. It's the a national OCGFC. The owners and controllers of global financialized capital.

You're talking about a class of actors, powerful actors who have convergent interests, who have shared institutional access and control, and they have the organizational capacity to translate their interests into policy outcomes across multiple jurisdictions internationally and simultaneously, including the jurisdiction of The United States Of America. And this should produce something in you mentally, in your mind, intellectually that's important. Don't panic, but you should recognize something because the conditions that produced rebellion, the conditions that produced insurgency and parallel power structures and community sovereignty across the colonized world, those same conditions are being reproduced inside the borders of the formal imperial hegemon itself. And there's no analytical reason whatsoever to believe that the same cannot and will not happen inside The United States itself. It's occurring now.

It's happening now. So what about the military industrial companies? Where where are they gonna get their money now if the a national OCGFC controlling everything, not the nationalistic ones? Where are they gonna get their contracts? If America is withdrawing, right, from global hegemony, if the a national OCGFC is the managing actor in the the the transition to a multipolar world, then the the the nationalistic, the the military industrial complex, how are they gonna sustain their own profit?

Their their sustain their own procurement if the external wars wind down, where's their revenue come from? Well, I'll tell you where it comes from. Two markets, and both of those markets are already open for business, and the first is domestic, right there in America. The ten thirty three program has already transferred over $7,000,000,000 in military surplus hardware to domestic police departments. MRAPs, you're talking about grenade launchers, you're talking about surveillance aircraft, military communication systems, so forth.

The equipment entered the domestic policing market before there was any domestic emergency to justify that. You understand the equipment preceded the doctrine because the doctrine always follows the equipment. The equipment needs operational use in order to justify further procurement. The surveillance architecture was built under the Patriot Act, and that was always dual use. Palantir is embedded in the, ICE enforcement operations.

This is the clearest example ever of a firm that deliberately constructed its whole business model, around the convergence of military intelligence technology and domestic law enforcement. Their valuation depends on both markets expanding simultaneously. The private detention complex has already demonstrated that detained populations are a profit generating asset class. What do you think the the the immigration raids are about? All this mass deportation infrastructure, you think that's ideological?

This is not a political project. It's a demand generation mechanism for the detention industry, for the incarceration industry. Every detained migrant or even if they're not a migrant, they don't care. Everyone that they detained is a source of revenue for them. This is where MIC is is pivoting.

Counter terrorism, that's an industry. Training programs, consulting firms, threat assessment technologies, and so on and so forth. That was all built around the post nine eleven world, the the external threat. It was built for external threat, but now it's reorienting towards domestic application. They've been doing that for over a decade.

The designation of domestic groups as terrorist organizations, that's gonna increase. The the the material support statutes that they have about providing material support for this and that and the other. Domestic violent extremism as a threat category. All of these things. These are all institutional prerequisites for applying counter terrorism at home.

Counter terrorism infrastructure, most importantly. The equipment, like I say, applying it domestically at scale. The legal architecture already exists. The techno technological infrastructure already exists. The institutional culture already certainly exists, built through twenty years of treating Muslim communities like a threat, surveillance targets.

Right? And not to mention, obviously, even before the Muslims, black political organizing was a threat. So now any community that organizes or any community that that is regarded as a challenge, this is a potential insurgency. Once the infrastructure is in place, the infrastructure is in place, all you have to do is turn it in any direction you like against any population that you label as a threat. The the whole point is you the use of the infrastructure, the use of the equipment.

Then the second market for the military industrial complex and the nationalistic OCGFC is obviously Europe, and I've talked about that before. NATO rearmament. This is an extraordinary business opportunity. Europe rearming. Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop, general dynamics.

The the the optimal outcome of the Ukraine conflict for them is not victory. You should you should understand this. It's not victory and it's not defeat. It's a continuation. Continuation of war, continuation and expansion.

A grinding sustained conflict that requires continuous weapons transfers, continuous restocking, replacement, more procurement, and so on. Continuous ammunition production. No no one cares about a political outcome. Understand this. Trump put pressure on the European NATO members to increase their defense spending by three to 4% of GDP.

Imagine that. That's turning NATO from a US subsidized alliance into a a customer base. Europe pays for their own defenses, buying American systems through American approved procurement channels. You understand? The the military industrial complex gets their revenue without The US taxpayer now.

Without The US taxpayer paying the debt, the Europeans will pay for it. It's a franchise model. It's a franchise model being applied to a military alliance. And the deliberate cultivation of instability across Europe, I've been talking about that ever since the Ukraine war started, I've been talking about that. Destabilization, deindustrialization.

Right? All of this is gonna create more and more strife and tension within within countries and between countries. The purpose of that is to drive conflict between European states. The EU is falling apart. You've got the the the populations of Europe terrified of Russian expansion.

And as long as they're terrified, they'll tolerate their defense budget going out while they're not getting anything. The same thing, the austerity programs, everything is the same thing that's happening in America is happening in Europe. You understand? The military industrial complex is pivoting from external imperial wars to a combination of domestic militarized policing in The United States, militarized policing, surveillance, detention, incarceration business, counter insurgency eventually, and hot wars in Europe. These are the new profit centers as American global hegemony contracts.

These are the new profit centers for the nationalistic OCGFC. And the populations that are gonna bear the cost, bear the brunt of all of this are obviously gonna be those American communities that is designated as security threats and European populations that are already living under the shadow of a conflict that serves external financial interests rather than their own security. Look, for the past two centuries at least, the directional flows were very clear how things worked, what way things flowed. Capital flowed South to north through resource extraction, debt servicing, profit repatriation from the global South to the global North. That was that flow.

And violence flowed from the North to the South, military interventions, coups, proxy wars, cartel management. And all of that was directed from the imperial centers towards the colonized peripheries in the South, and poverty was concentrated in the South, and institutional stability and power and control was concentrated in the global North. Now every one of these flows is reversing direction. Capital is flowing towards the global South because that's where the productive future is. The productive economic future is there.

The a national OCGFC are repositioning, and now violence is migrating towards the North. Domestic militarization, like I say, surveillance, detention, the early stages of what will become counterinsurgency operations in America and in Europe. On European soil, the populations that are abandoned by the transition are gonna start to organize and they're gonna start to rise up. Poverty is spreading northward now through deindustrialization, through financialization, through wage suppression, and through, as I say, the demographic decline that's hollowing out the whole material basis of northern working populations. And the institutional stability that was in the North, the global South is developing stronger institutional frameworks now.

They're building impressive frameworks, bricks, regional hegemons, alternative financial infrastructure, financial architecture, while the Northern institutions are being deliberately hollowed out. The EU is fracturing. American so called democratic institutions are being gutted. The so called rules based international order, which was always primarily just a mechanism for enforcing American supremacy, that's collapsing. The narrative about it is collapsing.

This is the North South Hemisphere reversal. Okay. It's not symmetric, and it's not complete. The global South isn't suddenly safe. The global South isn't suddenly prosperous, but the direction of the trend has inverted.

And the mechanisms that are driving that inversion are the same, the the the same mechanisms that drove the original colonial relationship. Now it's just operating in reverse. Do you understand me? America is not becoming exactly like, Latin America, but America is experiencing the same thing that Latin America experienced because it was always the same thing. It was always the same tool kit.

It was always the same logic. It was always the same class interest just applied in a different geography. The United States Of America spent the cold the the the cold war. During the cold war, they developed and they refined, and then they exported a complete toolkit for managing colonized populations. COENTELPRO was domestically, the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the school of the Americas for so called Latin America, for the for the militaries of so called Latin America, structural adjustment reforms through the international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, Cartel management, like I say, management of cartels as a destabilization instrument.

Now that tool kit is being deployed domestically in The United States and in Europe. The School of the Americas graduates who learned counterinsurgency so called techniques, torture techniques to apply against their own populations. Turns out that they were receiving training that would eventually be applied to American populations by American services, security services, trained in the same doctrines, the same tactics, the same techniques. The violence of empire always returns home. Hannah Arendt called that the boomerang, boomerang effect.

That boomerang has arrived. Now I wanna bring all this back to where I started, talking about the cartels. Let's bring it back to the cartels now. Because I've been arguing that the cartels function as colonial instruments. Not because, again, not because the CIA is necessarily, running them from Langley, but because their existence their existence perpetuates exactly the conditions of managed disorder that serves the interests of the OCGFC across the whole region.

But the cartels are also something else, and don't be shocked by this. It's important. Don't be shocked by this. The cartels are something else. There's something else about the cartels that we need to think about, and that is that the cartels work.

Not morally, not justly. The human cost is absolutely catastrophic. You're talking about thirty thousand people killed and murdered in Mexico in a single year. Families destroyed, communities living under constant terror, constant extortion, and so forth. You can't minimize any of that.

Obviously, there's no way to condone any of that. But functionally, in territories where the Mexican state, the federal government has failed to provide security, to provide economic opportunity, to provide social services, to provide legitimate governance, the cartels have provided all of those things. Better roads, clinics, food distribution, employment at scale. In Sinaloa, cartel economic activity has been integrated into agricultural supply chains since the nineteen forties. They've been around a long time.

People protect El Mencho's memory not because they're stupid, not because they're brainwashed, and not because they're evil, but because for many communities in Jalisco, the CJNG has been a more reliable provider than the Mexican federal government ever was. That's not propaganda. That's what you call political economy. What the cartels demonstrate, and this is the demonstration that I want you to to to to reflect upon, is that parallel power is possible. Territorial control, economic systems, social services, military capacity, political infiltration, cultural identity, all built over decades starting from nothing against the opposition of multiple state militaries, multiple state intelligence services.

In the vacuum that was left by state failure and state exploitation, a parallel power structure was able to achieve functional sovereignty in Mexico. You need to think about that. It's very uncomfortable to think about, but you need to think about that. So what if the the this is what you need this is why you need to think about it. Because what if the people who were building that parallel power structure were not savage criminals who were extracting from their own from their own communities?

What if they were decent citizens? What if they were decent citizens who were organized and principled and ethically grounded? What if they were genuinely committed to their their their community's well-being, to their people's interests? What if they did the same thing? And by the same thing, I don't mean drug trafficking.

I mean the same thing in terms of building a a parallel power structure. We've seen glimpses of this before. Alto Defenseas in 2013, 2014. Communities that organized themselves against cartel extortion, against cartel violence. So they built their own security structures.

They had their own governance, and they worked until the federal government co opted them. And then the cartels infiltrated them, and they were they were over. But the demonstration was there. You understand? The demonstration is there.

The illustration is there. Communities can build functional parallel sovereignty. The question is whether or not they can maintain it, and depending on what the context is, what the situation is. And this is a question that doesn't only pertain to Mexico. Because what I'm saying about The United States, I'm not talking about I'm using Mexico as an example, because The United States is functionally collapsing as a governance structure for significant portions of the population.

Okay. It's not collapsing militarily because the the the coercive capacity is always gonna be there. But in terms of the state's ability and the the state's willingness to provide basic good governance to millions of their own citizens, this is collapsing in terms of providing security, in terms of providing economic opportunity, in terms of providing health care, in terms of providing education, institutional fairness. This collapse is already underway. It's already progressing.

These are not homogenous communities. They include post industrial white working class populations, both in the cities and in places like Appalachia, in the Rust Belt, hollowed out by deindustrialization and the opioid crisis. Then obviously, black and brown urban communities dealing with poverty, dealing with violence, dealing with infrastructure failure, dealing with minimal functional, state presence at all except in terms of policing. Immigrant communities that are trying to navigate the security apparatus that treats them as a threat no matter where they come from, no matter how legal or illegal they are, Muslim communities that are constantly under surveillance, indigenous communities and so forth, indigenous communities who have always known this experience more deeply than anyone else and longer. These communities are not all the same.

Their specific conditions differ, but they share a structural position. These are all populations for whom the state has become either predatory or has become absent. And a predatory or an absent state produces the same response across history regardless of geography. People organize outside the state. They build what they need.

They create parallel structures. So the question is, the only question that matters is what kind of structure can or parallel parallel structure can you build? The cartel model built parallel sovereignty through, extraction, through violence, through terror, through extortion, and so forth, through the monopoly of violence with no accountability to the community and so forth, and by serving the interests of managed disorder. But there are better examples in history. The Muslim community in Mecca, for example, before the Hijra.

You're talking about a community that was building its own ethical, economic, and social arrangements inside of a very hostile, very abusive, very exploitative dominant order. They weren't waiting for the Quraysh to reform before building an alternative. They built alternatives. Dar al Outkam, for example, was a parallel institution before there even was a Muslim state. And then, of course, the black community or the black church specifically.

We had economic cooperatives, you had mutual aid societies coming out of those churches, you had schools, had communication networks and so forth. All of this was built within within and against a very hostile state apparatus that explicitly excluded black Americans from civic life. And in Mexico, had the enchiepas, the Zapatistas, autonomous municipalities, their own education system, their own health system, their own economic arrangements that was built back in response to the NAFTA era, dispossession that they suffered. Thirty years on, they're still functioning. Still functioning against even continuing sustained state pressure.

Okay? These aren't models like the cartel. These are community sovereignty models. Community sovereignty models. The structural principle is the same.

When the state fails you, you build your own. It's the ethics and the purpose and the orientation. The orientation for for your own people's interests rather than extracting from your people. That's what makes them different. That's what makes the model different.

But the principle is the same. So to summarize, the global order is being reorganized. The post World War two American hegemony is ending. It's ending not because America was defeated by a rival power. It is ending because the material foundations of that hegemony that made that hegemony possible in the first place, those foundations, those material foundations have eroded.

And because a class of actors that actually controls policy, the the a national OCGFC, they have decided that the productive future correctly decided that the productive future lies elsewhere in the global South, and they're managing the transition accordingly. Donald Trump is the vehicle for that transformation in the American context. His job, again, whether he knows it or not, his job is to sell the dismantling of American imperial infrastructure, sell that as restoration. The GCC states are the financial patrons of this project, and they are positioning themselves as the intermediaries in the new multipolar financial architecture. Latin America Latin America, so called Latin America, is the clearest current demonstration of what this transition looks like on the ground.

The cartels funded by American consumption, armed by, American weapons manufacturers, their money laundered through American banks, protected by compromised American trained security apparatus. The cartels function as colonial instruments that maintain managed disorder across the region to prevent state consolidation in country after country after country and to provide perpetual leverage for whoever controls the chaos. The same tool kit is now being deployed northward. The same managed disorder, the same financial extraction, the same institutional hollowing out, the same population management through addiction, through addiction, incarceration, and surveillance. Colonization has come home.

And in the space that is left by falling states or failing states, whether it's in Mexico, the Northern Triangle, or in Appalachia, or in Detroit, or wherever else, in every community that the extracting class has abandoned. The question of what fills that vacuum is the defining political question of our time. Now the cartels have answered that question in one way, Functional sovereignty built on terror and extraction and extortion and fear. But you can answer it differently. Functional sovereignty built on ethics, built on community, built on mutual accountability, and built on genuine the genuine goods of governance.

The goods of governance, security, economic opportunity, education, dispute resolution, cultural identity that the failing state no longer provides. This is not utopian. I'm not talking about utopianism. I'm talking about practical. This is what the Zapatistas did.

This is what the early Muslim community did in Mecca. This is what every serious alternative to extractive power has had to do across time. Build real institutions that meet real needs for real people with an ethical foundation that makes them worth defending and that makes them worth sustaining. Parallel power structures can be built and that is proven by the cartels themselves whether we like it or not. Doesn't mean that a parallel power structure must necessarily be criminal and cruel and savage and violent.

The principle is valid. Parallel power structures can be built and they must be built. And if in fact, the truth of the matter is if you don't build an ethical one, you're gonna end up having to deal with an unethical one that comes in to fill the void. You've got to build something yourselves. And if you don't build it yourself, then something is gonna be built right on top of you.