US Political Economy on (Military) Life-Support

[Judi Lynn]

December 09, 2013

US Political Economy on (Military) Life-Support

Distortions of Capitalism
by NORMAN POLLACK

As American manufacturing, relatively speaking, in world-structural terms, continues to decline, we are witnessing for that very reason an increasing reliance on the military implementation of US global hegemony—an ultimately losing stratagem in the face of the global rise of multiple power centers, notably, China, but also a more coherent EU, the standbys Russia and Japan, newcomers, e.g., Brazil, and gradually emerging Third World modernization. We are no longer top dog, unilaterally defining capital flows, trading patterns, etc., to our liking. As US economic prowess recedes, its militarism is brought to the fore in ambitious schemes pairing offensive power-operations with imposed trade partnerships, as in Obama’s Pacific-first strategic framework side-by-side with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In both cases, the target is China, the first, as an object of encirclement and containment, the second, by virtue of its exclusion, similar fencing in and hoped-for economic ostracism. Obama and his national-security mavens, long habituated to Cold War thinking, are spoiling for war (or, short of war, the use and popularization of counterterrorism, to reinforce America’s post-World War II posture—to the present–of counterrevolution).

In Smithian terms, capitalism was thought the harbinger of international peace, trade a universal solvent of friendly, if competitive, relations. Not so, then or now, and by the twentieth century, the cauldron of rivalries culminating in war. We have not entered a New World of global development, rather, the opposite, the regurgitation of war-provoking tensions principally stimulated by an international division of labor, America in the foreground of riding herd on less-developed nations. Not even autarky, bad as it is, is an option, for the US, in sacrificing its budget and resources to the militarization of capitalism, is falling behind in maintaining a vital industrial base, accompanied by crumbling infrastructure, declining educational standards, and, trying to play catch-up with itself, an increase in the frequency of bubbles, unemployment, and widening class differences.

With difficulties of this magnitude, self-inflicted in the first place, no wonder an American leadership beholden to the upper stratum of wealth, and bereft of imagination, moving inexorably toward more aggressive political-economic strategies to forestall further decline. Hence, intervention, regime change, drone assassination, massive surveillance at home, eavesdropping on world leaders, and the attempted tightening of spheres of interest and influence, from the Middle East to Central and East Asia. Preparation for international conflict is presently a leading growth industry, facilitated by a benumbed populace jaded by technological gadgetry and imagined or blown up major-party differences, as the engine of wealth-accumulation goes on, now under the banner (making everything more deceptive) of liberalism.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/09/distortions-of-capitalism/