Markets, Murder and Trash: The Real New World Order Emerges in Juarez

06-21-2011 • Chris-Floyd.com

Do you want to know what the future looks like? Ed Vulliamy can show you. Just follow him down to Ciudad Juarez, where the witless, heedless, heartless machinery of "market fundamentalism" (or "late capitalism," or whatever other name you'd like to give to the unrestrained greed of our elites) has come to its logical, horrific culmination. Vulliamy notes, rightly, that the vast profits which the "upperworld" of the financial and political elite earns from the murderous drug trade is at the core of the nihilistic hellmouth that has opened up in Mexico. This same upperworld is also adamant in continuing the immeasurably corrosive and corrupting of criminalizing -- rather than regulating, mitigating and taxing -- the innate human desire to disorder the senses, for whatever reason: pleasure, escape, comfort, despair. But as Vulliamy also observes, the "drug war" and its discontents are just mirrors of the wider reality of a world ruled by zealots given over to the worship of money and its trappings to the exclusion of every other understanding of human worth. Below are some excerpts, but you should read the whole, harrowing piece: ....But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has imploded into a state of criminal anarchy – the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role. ... Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy.