vimeo.com/.../167847849

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!