Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  93 Astian Rotel, “Barons of a Bloody Turf War,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1993.

  94 James Brooke, “A Drug Lord Is Buried As a Folk Hero,” New York Times, December 4, 1993; “Cali Cocaine Cartel Leaders Offer Surrender Deal,” Agence France-Presse, December 17, 1993.

  95 Ken Dermota, “Snow Business: Drugs and the Spirit of Capitalism,” World Policy Journal 16, no. 4 (winter 1999–2000): 15–24: 15.

  96 Anita Snow, “Mexican Drug Smugglers Get Sophisticated,” Contra Costa Times, September 17, 1995.

  97 Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1996,” US Department of State, www.state.gov/www/global/narcotics_law/1996_narc_report/index.html.

  98 Jorge Chabat, “Mexico’s War on Drugs: No Margin for Maneuver,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 582 (July 2002): 134–148: 136.

  99 Tracey Eaton, “NAFTA Tied to Drug Traffic: U.S. Task Force Says Smugglers Exploit Rising Cross-Border Trade,” Dallas Morning News, May 11, 1998.

  100 Dermota, “Snow Business,” 16.

  101 Robert Collier, “Mexico’s New Emperor of Narcotics,” San Francisco Chronicle , February 26, 1996.

  102 Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

  103 Mark Fineman, “Vast Mexican Drug Empire Up for Grabs,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1997.

  104 Jorge G. Castañeda, “What’s Spanish for Quagmire?” Foreign Policy 177 (January 1, 2010).

  105 Quoted in “Mexicans Wince at U.S. Jab on Corruption, but Admit It’s Accurate,” EFE World News Service, June 15, 2005.

  106 David Luhnow and Jose De Cordoba, “Mexico Detains Former Top Drug Cop,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2008.

  107 The sequence of statements is laid out by Jorge Castañeda, “The Danger Across the Border,” Newsweek (International Edition), February 2, 2009. US Joint Forces Command, The Joint Operating Environment 2008: Challenges and Implications for the Future Joint Force (Suffolk, VA: US Joint Forces Command, Center for Joint Futures, December 2008), 36.

  108 Jens Erik Gould, “Calderon Rejects ‘Absurd’ Reports on Mexico Drug War,” Bloomberg.com, March 12, 2009, www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axUjKcbAt82w.

  109 Castañeda, “The Danger Across the Border.”

  110 “¿Qué quieren de nosotros?” El Diario (Ciudad Juarez), September 19, 2010.

  Chapter 15

  1 Oli Brown, Migration and Climate Change (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2008), 10.

  2 Sam Knight, “Human Tsunami,” Financial Times, June 19, 2009.

  3 Andrew Ross, “Greenwashing Nativism,” The Nation, July 29, 2010.

  4 Melissa Del Bosque, “Droning in Dollars,” Texas Observer, August 20, 2010.

  5 Peter Andreas, “Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-First Century,” International Security 28, no. 2 (autumn 2003): 78–111: 88.

  6 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (Verso: London, 2000).

  7 “Border Emergency,” Washington Post, August 26, 2005.

  8 “CBP Air and Marine Unit Gets New Helos for Border Security,” Aerospace Daily & Defense Report 223, no. 23 (August 2, 2007).

  9 “Securing America’s Borders: CBP Fiscal Year 2009 in Review Fact Sheet,” CBP.gov, November 24, 2009, www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/newsroom/news_releases/archives/2009_news_releases/nov_09/11242009_5.xml.

  10 “Stryker Soldiers Train in Southern New Mexico,” US Federal News, November 15, 2005.

  11 “Previously Secret Memos and Data Show Bush-Era Immigration Raids Were Law Enforcement Failure” (report by the Immigration Justice Clinic, Cardozo School of Law, New York, February 4, 2009).

  12 “Raids on Workers: Destroying Our Rights,” United Food and Commercial Workers International, 2009, www.ufcw.org/docUploads/UFCW ICE rpt FINAL 150B_061809_130632.pdf?CFID=10424600&CFTOKEN=46213002 (page 1).

  13 “Raids on Workers,” 5.

  14 Margaret Ramirez, “’96 Immigration Law Causing Rise in Deportations,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1998.

  15 “Detained and Dismissed: Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention,” Human Rights Watch, March 17, 2009, www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/03/16/detained-and-dismissed.

  16 Dora Schriro, “Immigration Detention: Overview and Recommendations,” Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, October 6, 2009, www.ice.gov/doclib/about/offices/odpp/pdf/ice-detention-rpt.pdf; Nina Bernstein, “Report Critical of Scope of Immigration Detention,” New York Times, October 6, 2009.

  17 “Immigrants Face Lengthy Detentions but Have Few Rights Change of Policy,” Daily Herald, March 22, 2009.

  18 See “Treated As Criminals: Asylum-Seekers in the USA,” chapter 5 of USA: Rights for All, Amnesty International, October 1998, www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/035/1998/en/fd3dc1e9-da98–11dd-80bc-797022e51902/amr510351998en.html.

  19 William Fisher, “U.S.: Immigration Detention Abuses Continue,” Inter Press Service, March 31, 2010.

  20 Valeria Fernández, “U.S.: Detained Migrant Women Shackled During Childbirth,” Inter Press Service, March 4, 2010.

  21 Adam Nossiter, “Arkansas Woman, Left in Cell, Goes 4 Days with No Food or Water,” New York Times, March 12, 2008.

  22 Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest, “Some Detainees Drugged for Deportation,” Washington Post, May 14, 2008.

  23 Tom Barry, “A Death in Texas: Profits, Poverty, and Immigration Converge,” Boston Review (November–December 2009).

  24 Barry, “A Death in Texas.”

  25 “Locked Up Far Away: The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States,” Human Rights Watch, December 2, 2009, www.hrw.org/en/node/86789.

  26 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; New York: Harper Perennial, 1966), 237.

  27 Kurt M. Campbell et al., The Age of Consequences: The Foreign-Policy National Security Implications of Global Climate Change (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for New American Security, 2007), 85–86.

  28 Campbell et al., Age of Consequences, 85–86; “Boyles Guest Brenda Walker Called Mexico ‘One of the Most Despicable Countries on Earth’; Said ‘Mexicans Are Good at . . . Establishing Smuggling Infrastructures’ and ‘Can Get Through . . . WMDs,’” Colorado Media Matters, October 20, 2006, http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200610200003. A profile of Brenda Walker is available at www.adl.org/immigration/blogosphere/Brenda_Walker.asp.

  29 “Boyles’ Guest Gheen Called Mexicans Who Contend Racism Is Driving U.S. Immigration Debate ‘Brown Nazis,’” Colorado Media Matters, October 9, 2007, http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200710100001.

  30 David Able, “Severin Suspended for Comments About Mexican Immigrants,” Boston, May 1, 2009, www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/01/severin_suspended_for_comments_about_mexican_immigrants.

  31 Able, “Severin”; “Savage: ‘Burn the Mexican Flag!’” Media Matters for America, March 31, 2006, http://mediamatters.org/research/200603310008.

  32 Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race, Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916). This book shaped the worldviews of people like Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst and helped justify American imperial expansion and the racially based immigration quotas of 1924.

  33 “Boortz Suggested Superdome As Place to ‘Store 11 Million Hispanics Just Waiting to Ship ’Em Back to Nicaragua, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico,’” March 29, 2006, Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/research/200603290004.

  34 “Boortz on Illegal Immigrants: ‘Give ’Em All a Little Nuclear Waste and Let’Em Take It On Down There to Mexico,” Media Matters for America, June 22, 2007, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/2007
06220005.

  35 “CNN ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Lou Dobbs Discredits His Network—One Wild Claim at a Time,” July 23, 2009, http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/200907230035.

  36 Lou Dobbs, “Border Insecurity; Criminal Illegal Aliens; Deadly Imports; Illegal Alien Amnesty,” CNN, April 14, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0504/14/ldt.01.html.

  37 Transcript of Beck available at “Beck Again Warned That If Muslims Don’t ‘Act Now’ by ‘Step[ping] to the Plate’ to Condemn Terrorism, They ‘Will Be Looking Through a Razor Wire Fence at the West,’” Media Matters for America, September 7, 2006, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200609070002.

  38 From the May 1, 2006, broadcast of Westwood One’s The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly, available at “O’Reilly Alleged Immigrant Protest ‘Organizers’ Have Hidden ‘Hardcore Militant Agenda’to Take Back American Southwest,” Media Matters for America, May 3, 2006, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200605030009.

  39 Bill O’Reilly quoted in “Media Figures Attacked Mexican-Flag-Wavers, but Not Those Waving Irish, Italian, or Israeli Flags,” April 3, 2006, Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/research/200604030012.

  40 Democracy Now, Headlines, May 11, 2010; Ken Silverstein, “Tea Party in Sonora,” Harper’s (July 2010).

  41 Jonathan J. Cooper, “Ariz. Governor Signs Bill Banning Ethnic Studies,” Associated Press, May 12, 2010.

  42 Bill O’Reilly, “The Truth About Arizona and Illegal Aliens,” FOX News, May 4, 2010, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,592129,00.html.

  43 Paul Rubin, “One-on-One Time with a Pinal County Deputy—Whose Claim He Was Shot by a Drug Smuggler Is Full of Holes—Produces Startling Results,” New Times (Phoenix), November 25, 2010.

  44 Matthews said Republicans “have a right to fear” seeing a “majority Latino population” and challenged Goodman, “Do you live in a Mexican neighborhood?” March 31, 2006, http://mediamatters.org/research/200603310012.

  45 In an NBC plug for Buchanan’s anti-immigrant book, Matthews declared that “thanks to this show,” the book would “probably” remain “number one on Amazon,” August 25, 2006, http://mediamatters.org/research/200608250008.

  46 Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), 1–2.

  47 Buchanan, State of Emergency, 6, 12, 28.

  48 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine , November 1964, 77–86.

  49 “Broad Approval for New Arizona Immigration Law: Democrats Divided, but Support Key Provisions,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, May 12, 2010, http://people-press.org/report/613/arizona-immigration-law.

  50 Jane Mayer, “Covert Operators,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010; George Monbiot, “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,” Guardian, October 25, 2010.

  51 Ian Traynor, “Sweden Joins Europe-Wide Backlash Against Immigration,” Guardian, September 24, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/24/sweden-immigration-far-right-asylum.

  52 Anthony Faiola, “Anti-Muslim Feelings Propel Right Wing,” Washington Post, October 26, 2010.

  53 Kate Connolly, “Gypsies Trapped Behind ‘European Wall of Shame,’” Guardian, October 24, 1999.

  54 Bill McKibben, Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2010), 145–146.

  Chapter 16

  1 Next Generation Nuclear Plant: A Report to Congress (prepared by the US Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, April 2010), 23, available at http://nuclear.energy.gov/genIV/neGenIV1.html.

  2 Mark Hertsgaard, “Regreening Africa,” The Nation, November 19, 2009.

  3 One can find literature on this at the UN Development Program’s Global Environmental Facility website at www.pnud-energia.org.bo.

  4 For a great takedown, see Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Mark Weisbrot, “Brazil’s Elections Will Matter for the Rest of the World,” Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), October 8, 2010; Mark Weisbrot, “Who Will Allow Brazil to Reach Its Economic Potential?” Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), August 27, 2010.

  5 Jia Lynn Yang, “Companies Pile Up Cash but Remain Hesitant to Add Jobs,” Washington Post, July 15, 2010.

  6 William Alden, “Wall Street Set for Best Two Years Ever, Thanks to Bailout,” Huffington Post, December 13, 2010.

  7 Aaron Lucchetti and Stephen Grocer, “On Street, Pay Vaults to Record,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2011.

  8 Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010.

  9 See Index Mundi: www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=food-price-index&months=60.

  10 Graphs are available at Index Mundi: www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat.

  11 Roxana Tiron, “Senate OKs Defense Bill, 68–29,” The Hill, October 22, 2009; Robert Higgs, “The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget Is Already Here,” Independent Institute, March 15, 2007, www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941; Laicie Olson, “Growth in U.S. Defense Spending Since 2001,” Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, March 11, 2010, http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/fy11_growth_since_2001 (accessed January 13, 2011).

  12 “U.S. Individual Income Tax: Personal Exemptions and Lowest and Highest Bracket Tax Rates, and Tax Base for Regular Tax,” Tax Years 1913–2008, Table 23, IRS.gov, www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=175910,00.html. For more recent data, see “Revenues, Outlays, Deficits, Surpluses, and Debt Held by the Public, 1971 to 2010, in Billions of Dollars,” Budget and Economic Outlook: Historical Budget Data, Congressional Budget Office, January 2011, Table E-1, 1.

  13 “Dealing in Doubt: The Climate Denial Industry and Climate Science” (report by Greenpeace International, Amsterdam, March 24, 2010), 4; also see Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  14 “Exxon Still Aids Climate Skeptics,” The Australian, July 20, 2010.

  15 Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010; “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” (report by Greenpeace USA, Washington, DC, March 30, 2010); “Toxic 100 Air Polluters,” Political Economy Research Institute, March 2010, www.peri.umass.edu/toxic_index (accessed on January 1, 2010).

  16 Christian Parenti, “Winning the War of Ideas,” In These Times, October 2003; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

  17 “Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming Modest Support for ‘Cap and Trade’ Policy,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, October 22, 2009, http://people-press.org/report/669/.

  18 Andrew Malone, “My Life on the Run: The Police ‘Spy’ Lifts Lid on Eight Years As Eco-Warrior,” Daily Mail (UK), January 17, 2011; Matthew Taylor and Paul Lewis, “Undercover Police Officer Mark Kennedy at Centre of International Row,” The Guardian (UK), January 13, 2011. This outrageous abuse of police power took place under a Labour government purportedly committed to addressing climate change, and some of the intelligence gathered on radical grassroots activists went all the way to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s desk.

  19 Brian Tokar, Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (Grenmarsvegen, Norway: Communalism Press, 2010), 13.

  20 Suzanne Goldenberg, “Barack Obama’s Key Climate Bill Hit by $45m PR Campaign,” The Guardian (UK), May 12, 2009.

  21 Robert S. Eshelman, “Cracking Big Coal,” The Nation, May 3, 2010.

  22 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 293.

  23 “Bolivia: Government to Announce Stimulus Package for SMEs,” El Deber, September 2, 2009.

  24 John Vidal and Jonathan Watts, “Copenhagen Closes with Weak Deal That Poor Threaten to Reject—Non-Binding Accord Limits Temperature Rises but Includes No Emissions Targets,” The Guardian (UK), D
ecember 19, 2009.

  25 Pablo Solon, “Why Bolivia Stood Alone in Opposing the Cancún Climate Agreement,” The Guardian (UK), December 21, 2010.

  26 Damian Carrington, “WikiLeaks Cables Reveal How US Manipulated Climate Accord,” The Guardian (UK), December 3, 2010; also see the cable sent February 26, 2010, at 22: 41, “Secret Section 01 Of 03 STATE 018437,” Guardian.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/251174?intcmp=239.

  27 “Methane,” Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/methane.

  28 Jennifer Kho, “The Largest Cleantech VC: China,” GigaOM, February 26, 2010; also see “Towards a Global Green Recovery: Recommendations for Immediate G20 Action” (report submitted to the G20 London Summit, April 2, 2009).

  29 “EU Energy Chief Wants 1 Trillion Euro Network Revamp,” Reuters, November 10, 2010.

  30 Quoted in Christian Parenti, “The Case for EPA Action,” The Nation, April 15, 2010.

  31 On IBM, see Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon, “The Business of Buying American: Public Procurement As Trade Strategy in the USA,” Review of International Political Economy 13, no. 5 (December 2006): 701–724: 704. For a view of the Indian government’s role in building up a technology sector with its purchasing power, see Rajeeva Sinha, “Government Procurement and Technological Capability: Case of Indian Electrical Equipment Industry,” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 48 (November 26, 1994): 142–147.

  32 For discussion of leftist green theories of capitalism, see Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice (London: Verso, 1993).

  33 John Bellemy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

  34 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Penguin Classics, 1976), 1: 637.

  35 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 41.

  36 Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: New Press, 2006).