This episode of It's the End of the World
as we know it and I feel fine
was made possible by contributions
from slaves like you.
Spank you very much!
Nice little revolution we're having here.
Revolution? What do you mean revolution?
Please... don't try to tell me about
revolution.
I know all about the revolutions
and how they start.
The people that read the books
they go to the people who don't
read the books,
the poor people, and they say
the time has come to have a change, huh?
Shhhhhh!
Shhh-shhh-shhh shit shoosh!
I know what I'm talking about
when I'm talking about the revolutions.
The people who read the books
go to the people who can't the books,
the poor people,
and say we have to have a change.
So the poor people make the change.
And then the people who read the books,
they all sit around the big polished
tables, and they talk and talk and talk,
and eat and eat and eat...
But what has happened to the poor people?
They're dead!
Goooooooood morning slaves
and welcome to another sedition of
It's the End of the World as we Know it
and I Feel Fine
the show where athletes double
as travel agents.
We did get word that a famous
Brazilian football star, Rivaldo,
who's hugely famous, did make some
very controversial comments...
Rivaldo has called on tourists
not to travel to Rio de Janiero
for the Olympic Games.
And what he said is
international visitors should stay away
from the Olympic Games.
They'll be putting their lives at risk
if they do come.
Uh.... I'm not going.
I am your host the Stimulator
and ten years ago, leftists worldwide
were celebrating the so-called pink tide
that was sweeping across Latin America.
Like the commie domino-effect
nightmares that keep Henry Kissenger
up at night...
THE HORROR
in country after country
socialist heads of state were
elected into office,
promising to break their countries free
from the shackles of the IMF
and to slap down the corrupt
local mothafuckin elite,
who for decades had grown accustomed
to treating national economies
like their own personal
fucking piggy banks.
In many ways this gauchismo was fuelled
by the explosive growth
of militant social movements,
comprised of a dynamic mix
of urban proles,
landless peasants,
and Indigenous peeps.
Buuuuuuut while it's undeniable that
the past ten years has witnessed
important gains in the region,
from declining rates of poverty
and illiteracy,
to massive increases in social spending...
the reality is that this experiment
in Socialism for the 21st Century
was still capitalist as fuck
and largely financed by
the historic high price of oil
and other export commodities.
And now that the party’s over,
the pendulum is starting to
swing back to the right.
While Dubya and his batshit cabal
of neocon advisers were too distracted
by their crazy fucking obsession
with bombing the Middle East
into freedom,
the Obama administration
has quietly been hard at work
re-asserting the Monroe Doctrine
of American hemispheric dominance.
From the Hillary-orchestrated
coup d'état in Honduras, in 2009,
to Obama's historic meeting
with Raul Castro, that helped open
Cuba's proud and culturally-rich nation
to the plague of American tourists....
the United Snakes sits poised and ready
to capitalize on the economic
and political chaos currently
destabilizing the region.
The point is...
the United States will not be
imprisoned by the past.
And at the top of their list is Venezuela,
the oil-rich nation currently
wracked by hyper-inflation,
shortages of food and basic goods,
and an energy crisis that has
given rise to daily rolling blackouts.
Scenes of mass looting
and violent street clashes between
opponents and supporters of
President Nicolas Maduro,
have American policy-makers
and oil companies salivating at the
prospect of imminent state collapse.
For his part, Maduro has declared
a state of emergency,
and has given a tentative green light
for workers to start expropriating
closed factories,
in a desperate effort to shore up
his declining support,
and kick-start the economy.
Maduro is facing the prospect of
a recall referendum,
a constitutional process which he has
decried as a Washington-backed
coup d'etat,
echoing the language of his former
fellow comrade-in-chief, Dilma Rousseff
who was suspended from office
following an impeachment vote
in Brazil's senate on May 12th.
I have not committed any crime
under the constitution and law
to justify an interruption
to my mandate.
To condemn someone for a crime
that they did not commit,
is the greatest violence
that can be committed against
any person.
Leftists and so-called progressives
around the world have faithfully
echoed the Telesur line,
describing the opposition's power-grab
in Brazil as a coup,
or golpeachment.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuut many of the peeps
taking to facebook to valiantly decry
this gross breach of democratic process
seem perfectly fucking content to ignore
the fact that Dilma had become
a widely hated figure, with an
approval rating of just 9 fucking percent
and millions of peeps regularly taking
to the streets to demand her resignation.
Or that she was president of
the board of directors of
the state oil company Petrobras,
while upwards of 33 billion
fucking dollars was lost to corruption,
in a giant fucking scandal
that implicated more than half of
the country's sitting politicians,
including many members of her own party.
Or the inconveniently neoliberal character
of her government itself,
which oversaw the violent pacification
of the county's favelas
by heavily militarized BOPE pigs,
and the massive waste of money
spent on useless fucking infrastructure
to prepare the country to play host
to the World Cup in 2014,
and the FIVE COCK RINGS OF DEATH
this summer....
which, by the way,
look like they're slated to be
an epic fucking disaster.
So... while it's true that
the old-guard of Latin American politics
are corrupt, neoliberal pieces of shit,
in the pocket of Uncle Sam,
it's also long-time past due
that leftist commentators
got over their moralistic
and hypocritical rhetoric of democracy
and realized that
class war is a gruelling process,
and that the impetus for
revolutionary transformation
comes from below,
not from top-down state structures,
no matter how revolutionary
their leaders claim to be.
This year marks the tenth anniversary
of the mothafuckin Oaxaca Commune,
a seven month long popular insurrection
in the land of tacos,
dubbed by some commentators as
the first Latin American revolution
of the 21st century.
For those not familiar with
this epic fucking chapter in
the annals of revolt,
the Oaxacan uprising began in May of 2006
when members of the famously militant
Section 22 of the national teachers union,
the CNTE, went on strike
and occupied the central square,
or Zócalo, in the state's capital
of Oaxaca City,
demanding that the government invest
more public skrilla in education,
and specifically in schools located
in the state's remote rural areas,
where the majority of the students
come from the families of
poor Indigenous farmers.
Buuuuuuuuuuut rather than
break them off a bigger piece,
on June 14th,
Oaxaca's fascistic fucking governor,
Ulises Ruiz Ortiz,
sent in a squad of 3000 pigs
to violently clear out
the teachers' occupation,
and shut down their radio station,
Radio Planton,
which had been broadcasting updates
about the strike,
alongside interviews with grateful
parents and students.
Well.... as shit turns out,
that was a big mothafuckin mistake!
Responding immediately to
this blatant act of aggression,
thousands of peeps
took to the streets,
kicked the pigs outta dodge,
and set to work building barricades.
At its peak, the Oaxaca Commune
was dotted with over 3,000 barricades,
which completely paralyzed the pigs
ability to operate,
launch raids, or make deployments
anywhere in the fucking city.
In other words... for months
there were no fucking police!
BASS DROP
Within this power vacuum,
a horizontal structure
of popular self-governance,
called the Asamblea Popular
de los Pueblos de Oaxaca,
or APPO,
was formed to take over the coordination
of self-defense and organization
of everyday life in the commune.
The revolt spread quickly across Oaxaca
with students occupying their universities
and other peeps occupying
government buildings,
and forming popular assemblies
in cities and villages across the state.
All of these assemblies issued
repeated demands that the state’s governor
step down and fuck off.
On August 1st,
a mob of revolutionary women
seized the state radio
and television stations,
transforming them into vital hubs
of communication and coordination,
broadcasting regular
revolutionary programming, and updates
of activity within the liberated area.
Women took a leading role in many other
aspects of the insurrection as well,
from organizing rallies and marches,
to defending barricades,
and by doing so were able to
temporarily liberate themselves
from the patriarchal division of labour
that had traditionally relegated them
to roles as domestic caregivers
Tragically, the Oaxaca Commune
had its beating heart ripped out
in late October,
when an army of Federal police
managed to clear out the
occupied Zócalo in Oaxaca City.
While sustained resistance continued
for another two months,
these were dark fucking days,
in which many revolutionary militants
were detained and arrested
on trumped up charges,
and dozens more disappeared,
or assassinated by mothafuckin
paramilitary death squads
working for the Mexican security forces.
Buuuuuut while the Oaxaca Commune
was ultimately crushed by
this grim fucking wave of repression,
the spirit of revolt it inspired
and drew upon has lived on.
Today, Oaxaca remains a site
of militant resistance to the
neoliberal fuckery of the Mexican state.
And the teachers from section 22,
who helped kick things off a decade ago,
are still at the forefront
of this resistance.
For the past several years,
they have been fighting against
attempts by the country's
gringo-hugging jefe,
Enrique Peña Nieto,
to enforce capitalist reforms
on the state education system.
So... to learn a bit more about
what's been going down,
I recently caught up with Cesar Chavez,
a teacher from Oaxaca,
and member of Section 22 of the CNTE.
Hey Cesar… how the fuck are you?
Well... we are working hard. We're tired
Shortly after being elected,
Mexico's current President
Enrique Peña Nieto passed a series
of neoliberal reforms called
the Pact for Mexico.
One of these reforms was an overhaul
of the Mexican education system.
Can you explain the motivations
behind these reforms,
and why they've sparked resistance
from teachers in Oaxaca?
In 2012,
in the Presidential elections in Mexico
the PRI came back into power,
the party that has been abusing
the Mexican people
for most of the last 100 years.
The Pact for Mexico is basically
a plot to reform various
government-run institutions,
which requires changes to
the Mexican Constitution
being pushed for by the United States.
They want to privatize all of
the productive sectors of the country
– energy, labour, finance, even water –
and one of the specific reforms
deals with the third article of
the Mexican constitution,
which the government needs to change
in order to allow for
the privatization of education.
So the state is seeking to avoid
its obligation to guarantee free
public and non-religious education,
which in its basic form covers children
from the age of 3 to 15 years old.
And one of the principal obstacles
is the rights of teachers to
permanent labour contracts.
So they've invented an evaluation
that will allow them to lay off teachers
without any legal recourse,
and they are proposing this as
a federal education model.
But here in Oaxaca, we teachers
are continuing to struggle and to fight,
as always, because we are against
the privatization of educational services.
Their proposed reforms would mean
three years from now,
that many poor children from the barrios
won't be able to go to school.
Without offering basic education services,
they are dooming our children to misery.
And it's clear that this is a model
being imposed by the World Bank and IMF.
They are imposing this type of model
in Latin America, and they have
already experimented with this model
in other South American countries,
and now they want to
implement it in Mexico.
But here in Oaxaca we are going to resist.
Because children deserve free
public and non-religious education.
What types of tactics have teachers
been using to resist
the government's proposed changes?
At this time the resistance is civil,
peaceful and organized.
In Oaxaca we have been constructing
an anti-hegemonic educational project.
We understand this as a project
against the imposition of
an educational curriculum model
that will favour the private sector
- that will favour capitalism.
We have a model based in
our own cultural diversity.
We make up part of the original
inhabitants of this land.
And what we are proposing is
the empowerment of the culture
of our people.... our language....
our way of living...
our way of organizing.
We are trying to create a model
in the almost 13,000 schools
in the state of Oaxaca.
And we have a general project,
but each community
- each school according to
their geographical area,
their culture - will adopt and will create
these resistance models in their schools.
We're including ways
of working with textbooks,
but also with oral history.
And it doesn't only include teachers.
It involves the community.
It includes workers, peasants,
the ladies preparing tortillas...
because we believe their knowledge
is important too and we want to
value these types of knowledge.
Teachers in Mexico,
particularly in its southern states,
have been at the forefront of many
recent popular struggles,
and have also been a primary target
of state and paramilitary repression.
A dramatic recent example
is the 43 missing Normalista students
in the state of Guerrero.
Why do the struggles of teachers
resonate so strongly with
other sectors of Mexican society?
And why does the state see you
as such a threat?
The struggle of the teachers has been
going on in this country since the 1960s.
And it's been very linked to
the resistance of the original peoples
- to the Indigenous peoples.
And that's the reason the state
sees us as such a threat.
We've been speaking about other ways
of doing politics, outside of
parliamentary or electoral politics,
and questioning the true roles
and functions of political parties.
And so the state is trying to destroy
the resistance of
the education teachers of Oaxaca.
The disappearances in our country
has had a lot of international coverage
because these young people,
these Normalistas, were training
to put themselves at the service
of the education of our people.
They were brutally disappeared,
and it's a totally atrocious act,
but we have to insist that
they are not just 43.
After the 43 there have been more killings
in the state of Oaxaca.
We can count 260 teachers
that have been killed,
and others that have disappeared.
And we can also say that there's over
30 people have had to leave into exile.
This is only in the state of Oaxaca.
In 2006, teachers rose up
against former Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.
That same year,
President Felipe Calderón
launched Mexico’s War on Drugs.
These intervening years
have witnessed a sharp escalation
of neoliberal capitalist restructuring
and further militarization of
the Mexican state security forces.
How have these changes affected
the situation on the ground in Oaxaca?
The movement of 2006 was
a massive social movement
that involved many aspects of society.
The federal government immediately
militarized these peaceful protests,
like they are militarizing now
the state of Oaxaca,
where there's currently 25,000
police deployed.
By comparison, back in 2006,
they deployed approximately 14,000.
At that time, we faced
incredibly high levels of repression.
There was more than 26 people killed
- 26 that we can confirm,
but there's testimony that
hundreds of people were disappeared.
So, the government,
along with the Narcos,
declared a war against the people.
It takes men with sick minds
to declare a war on an entire people.
Those are decisions that
obviously reflect the logic of
a broader system
- an international capitalist system.
So, in this war there's been
more than 200,000 disappearances.
And its principally innocent people,
the sons and daughters of peasants,
- who are very much the lifeblood
of their communities - that are
being picked up by these organizations
- by these criminal gangs
of drug traffickers.
And so for all this time
we've basically been living
in an extended state of siege.
In 2010, the ruling PRI party
lost the state elections in Oaxaca...
the first time in 80 years.
Governor Ulises Ruiz was succeeded
by Gabino Cué Monteagudo,
a member of the supposedly left-wing
Citizen's Party.
Buuuuuuuuuut under his rule
the pace of neoliberal reforms
has only increased.
What effect has this had on regular
Mexicans' faith in the electoral system?
Well yes... after more than 80 years
of the PRI in Oaxaca,
we finally have a new government.
But that's not just an internal matter.
We believe that this situation was
manipulated by the gringos in Washington
- and not just for this part of Mexico,
but for other parts of Latin America
where they implanted, or granted
a so-called left-wing government
only to control and manage
the general discontent
of Latin American populations.
And in Mexico it was presented as if
this alternative would change our lives
for the better, and alleviate
the grievances of the workers
and the population in general.
Of course that is not how it played out,
and in the case of Oaxaca,
everyone understood that this
so-called leftist government
that we've had for the past six years
wasn't brought into power
to support the workers,
but was rather just an extension
of the traditional ruling parties.
Politically, nothing has changed
and regular people understand this
very well.
So in Oaxaca, there's no less than
36 major capitalist projects underway
funded by the World Bank,
and international capital.
Canadian capital is invested
in mining in Oaxaca,
and they are being supported
in their operations by this new
so-called leftist government.
These projects are displacing communities
and contaminating our natural resources.
Our water is being contaminated.
So this is the kind of situation
we're living in in our state...
and we are trying to resist and organize.
And we really want people to know this.
What is the level of coordination
between revolutionaries in Oaxaca
and other popular movements
such as the Zapatistas,
or the auto-defense forces of Michoacán?
Well...
there's various organizations that resist.
This includes groups like the Zapatistas,
or EZLN, and the insurgents in Guerreo
and other organizations
that don't compromise with the state.
They demand autonomy.
This is what these struggles are about.
This is why the state wants to militarize
and paramilitarize these spaces.
For example in Michoacan,
which is talked about a lot in Oaxaca,
these people have decided to
defend themselves from larger forces
that have been trying to impose
these criminal ideas.
And we are trying to coordinate
with these forces that resist.
And we believe it's going to be a long
and difficult process,
because there's repressive conditions
that make it hard to organize.
The state will never give us what we need
or what we want without struggle,
so we need to do our best to fight back.
And so this is what we think
we are going to do,
and this is how are going to triumph.
Thanks Cesar.
And that about does it for this sedition
of It’s the End of the World
as we Know it and I Feel Fine.
I wanted to let y’all know that
during the summer months
we will be closing down the firehose
output of videos to a comfortable
garden hose cadence.
Did that metaphor make any fuckin sense?
Anywho, you fuckers should not be
sitting in front of your computer
when it’s hot.
You should be outside
making fuckin trouble.
Buuuuuuuuut don’t worry
this shit should be out
about every three weeks until August,
when we will be back full force
with more seditions,
new A is for Anarchy shorts
and mini reports from
the global muthafuckin resistance.
That said, a virtual fist bump
goes out to the following slaves
who gave us a hand at making this
Soliloquy of Seditious Savagery.
So big ups to:
Sebastian, Yifan, Renzo, Christopher,
Michael, Reto, Gavin, Jeremy, Debbie,
Raul, Daniel, Maciej, Willie, Justina,
Kirk, Rob, Mason, John, Michael, Itay,
Romain, Marisol, Joseph, Andrew,
Lauren, Ina, Coby, Sebastien, Stephen,
Juliano, Joseph, Gabriel, Willam, Bear
Michael, Flyn, Per, Jamie, Andrew, Jan,
Jane, Brina, Jonathan, Steve,
Blade and Karils.
Tlayudas!
I also want to send a warm welcome
to the newest member of the Taconspiracy:
Laura.
Mescalito!
Stay tuned to subMedia.tv for more news
from the global muthafuckin resistance.
Hasta la pasta compañeras!