Wherever it treads, progress and wealth follows. In place of forests, plains, and urban ruins, structures rise and people thrive. The free market brings basic goods to the masses. Corporations feed the world. New millionaires in China, India, and Africa prove the value of capitalism.

Where ever capitalism treads, it manages to convince individuals of their invincibility.

The United States manages two wars and 700 military bases around the world to “secure” Americans from “terrorists,” who want to rob “Americans” of their freedom, even while the State has ordered a decree proclaiming the right to arrest, imprison, and kill not only “terrorists” but American citizens anywhere in the world. The “Americans,” over 6.3 million of them as of January 2010, have been out of work for more than six months (May 2010, New York Times). The number of homeless Americans “has reached crisis proportions not seen since the Great Depression” (April 2010, New York Times). In a nation at war with “terrorists” to protect the freedom of American citizens, nearly half its children and “an overwhelming majority of Black children,” according to the AFP, “will eat meals at some point during their childhood paid for by food stamps.” The Department of Defense’s budget is over $600 billion for fiscal year 2010.

How much money is spent to convince the American public to remain obedient, single-minded foot soldiers for the capitalists?

The capitalists on Wall Street received between $89 to $100 billion in bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, when their game of advancing other’s money and mortgages to their friends failed and crashed the market in part to buy the media. Terrorists high on the lists of terrorists are repeatedly captured or killed on one station while on another, Americans are shown western-modeled streets lined with high rise office buildings or apartments in India or China. The “people’s representatives in the U.S.,” hand-picked cronies, complicit in the facilitation of capitalist brutality and the corruption of the democratic experiment, know that the 1 billion poor children on this planet, the 640 million children without adequate shelter, the 400 million children with no access to safe water, the 270 million children with no access to health services, and the 101 million children without education worldwide (March 2010, Poverty Facts and Stats), are evidence of the terrifying reality capitalists have produced.

Ammunition, white phosphorus, F-16s, Blackhawks and Apaches helicopters, and unmanned aircraft vehicles are, for capitalists, a means of securing a specialized workforce of military personnel, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, mercenaries, the coerced exploited, of course, profits. Simultaneously sink the will of the people who would otherwise defend themselves against the consumption of their lives and gut the earth. Capitalists give, but capitalists take away more than they give. The capitalist control an economy built on the perpetuation of war and the increased exploitation of workers while dispossessing the poor and indigenous of resources and land to amass an ever greater concentration of wealth for themselves. Accumulation by dispossession. Take whatever remains and forestall the inevitable. Is this what the capitalists are thinking? Confiscate the land and dispossess the people of their means of survival while the capitalist drill and dynamite for more? Protected within exclusive gates communities, with white-skins, corporate power, and too-big-to-fail narratives, the capitalist are ruthlessly pulling on ever taut strings. Consolation prizes will ease collective sense of guilt for those working toward the expansion this madness? The violence of dispossession while too disturbing to confront eventually becomes acceptable, routine - inevitable.

The corporate media won’t report on the masses of indigenous people suffering but struggling against the capitalist confiscators. In April of this year, the Maasai women in the Loliondo village in Tanzania, for example, walked the election polls and turned in the identification cards necessary to vote in the October elections (Jerry Reynolds, FirstPeoplesWorldwide.com). A member of parliament for the Maasai in Northern Tanzania, Saning’o ole Telele, informed the government that the women, members of a cattle-herding community, were protesting the confiscation of their lands. “They want the government to know they are not being treated well.”

Maasai homes have been burned down; villagers have been evicted from their lands; and their cattle confiscated and their herders fined, writes Reynolds. The men must leave the community for months at a time “to look for grazing pasture and water for livestock,” said Udamishani Gidadeli, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Reynolds, FirstPeoplesWorldWide). The women are “left stranded with no water, medical help or food.” In addition, these women have been subjected to rape, and many have suffered miscarriages.

“Conservation evictions are going on with the encouragement of the government,” Jerry Reynolds informed me by phone. “The government in Tanzania is forced to develop its economy at the expense of the indigenous Maasai community.”

But the government isn’t alone in the search for wealth.

UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (UCN) claim that the Maasai lands have been ecologically in decline! If you are thinking - a national park complete with a safari range for great western adventurers - you are right! UNESCO and UCN have friends. The invisible hand can’t be far behind. In fact, it’s never behind but ahead of the game!

“The land is deteriorating for a number of reasons,” Reynolds said, “including drought.”

But the government’s evictions of the Maasai from the lands they have managed for centuries also offer a good excuse for capitalist development. This is the story no one wants to hear. Tourism on lands once grazed by the Maasai is becoming another playground for the capitalists who see nothing but profits not the Maasai’s loss of land and way of life or the continued loss of nature’s caretakers.

Water found on the Maasai lands, as Reynolds explained, equals hydropower plants. The forest equals timber for export to generate money. “In theory, this development helps the Tanzania government but depletes the environment and displaces the Maasai.”

What began as a protest in one village with women turning in their identification cards eventually expanded to other villages and other Maasai women following suit. According to Reynolds’ report at First Peoples World Wide in which he quotes Susanna Nordlund, police threatened violence if more than 400 Maasai women continued to walk toward the Loliondo administrative division. The government trucked a smaller group back to the Maasai village of Ololosokwan after they were arrested and interrogated by the police. Five hundred women managed to hide in the bush overnight and, the next morning, presented their party card (identification cards) to election officials.

But, in the end, Reynolds said, all of the women have either returned to their overcrowded lands or have been forced to move in with other family members outside their villages.

It’s all good, the capitalists tell us. It’s all good. Progress!

The gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is but one of several gushers and but one of several messages from Mother Earth! But melting glaciers, the drying up of lakes and water basins, the displacement and shuffling of the indigenous, poor, and working class don’t seem to phase the “invisible hand,” the almighty free market. Capitalism’s production of commodities is dispossessing humanity and nature of life, but, ironically, the “invisible hand” makes invisible the impacted of wealth accumulation at all cost.

In the novel, The Rings of Saturn, by the late German writer W.G. Sebald, the narrator (possibly the author himself) flying from Amsterdam to Norwich, contemplates the predicament of our species.

No where, writes the narrator, does he see people. Only the human-made things are visible.

No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today’s stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease.

“If we view ourselves,” Sebald continues, “from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.”

Tell us a happy story! Give us a happy ending!

Well, Steve Jobs of Apple wants to sell you a new and improved iPod - with a larger camera lens!

Contact www.firstpeoplesworldwide.org. for more information on the Maasai struggles in Tanzania.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.