[Peace-discuss] FW: Dear Europe

[Lisa Chason]

Forwarded with one footnote: Europeans have in large measure already
withdrawn from dollar holdings and the dollar is now propped by, in
particular, Japan and China. 


ZNet Commentary
Dear Europe December 10, 2004
By David Peterson

I'm growing a little weary of post-election European commentary about
the dangerous "stupidity" of the American masses. The reason for the
commentary is of course the, well, unwise election (the first one
actually) of the dangerous Bush, an action that was in fact based to no
small extent on mass ignorance. The overseas reaction is understandable
and predictable

I've been saying for some time that bringing back Dubya Bush would
significantly erode the welcome distinction that the rest of the world
tends to make between the American people ("we like you") and the
American government and policy ("it's just your government's policies we
don't like").

Still, Kerry was hardly a champion of noble human Enlightenment and was
thoroughly committed to the bloody racist imperial occupation of Iraq
and had worked quite hard to distance himself from domestic peace and
justice forces. Whatever mild efforts he would have made towards sanity
and decency in foreign and domestic policy --- the left tactical voting
argument on his behalf was always more about what he wouldn't do
(privatize Social Security, drill in Alaska, attack Syria and Iran and
wherever) than what he would do
---- would have been qualified by right wing domination in Congress,
judiciary, the state legislatures, and the powerful daily media "noise
machine." Not to mention his basic allegiance to corporate Neoliberal
capitalism.

So we're all dangerous morons because we brought back Bush. But we would
have been, what, benevolent, knowledgeable geniuses if we'd gone 2
percentage points differently and maybe tipped the "Winner-Take-All"
Electoral College to John "I am not a Redistribution Democrat" and "I
Participated in the Crucifixion of Southeast Asia" and "I Have a Plan to
More Effectively Subordinate Iraq" Kerry?

Please. Basically the US electorate breaks down about one third
Republican, one third Democrat, and one third disengaged...that's what
we've seen in recent elections and it was still going on despite
relatively large turnout in the last 'wartime' election. And the rise of
the right 'backlash' forces, heavily weighted by Evangelicals, in the
US, simply isn't new.

It gets a little tiring as a veteran observer of the American political
scene, to see it re-discovered again and again. The Liberal Consensus
cracked up in 1968 and Nixon and then Reagan relied to no small extent
on the same "paranoid-style" (Richard Hofstader) forces that have helped
make the loathsome Dubya into a two-termer. Whether Bush II will last
four more years depends on whether or not God tells him how to blow up
the planet.

One of the biggest differences between the citizenries of the United
States and Europe is that the second is much better informed about
global and domestic events. The European media, as Mike Albert recently
told me, "is way more combative and knowledgeable than here," so that
"the [European] populace, around many matters is far less ignorant, and
in some instances even pretty well informed."

Albert also points out that the Italians and the Spanish have "elected
outright fascists," referring to openly neo-fascist elected officials in
the Popular Party (Spain) and in Berlusconi's "Forza Italia" (Italy).
And "while there is a much larger and more effective social democratic
sector in Europe
- in some places ascendant and in other places not", Albert adds, "there
seems to less of a truly radical left and perhaps even of a progressive
but organized left outside labor. The anti-war movement seemed, much to
my surprise, less lively than here, as best as I could find - even in
Italy."

Consistent with the good American people/bad American government
dichotomy, Americans, when polled on an issue-specific basis, don't
actually give anything like majority support to most of the imperial
policies that are being enacted in their name.

A critical mass of Americans was convinced to go along with the invasion
of Iraq not because they actually accept America's preventive war
doctrine (just 17 percent of Americans think that the US has the
unilateral right to go to war if the US "has strong evidence of that
another country is acquiring weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that
could be used against the US at some point in the future") but because
"their" government and media had convinced them of something that was
factually incorrect: that the US was in imminent danger of being
attacked by a significantly WMD-armed Saddam.

According to a recent comprehensive public opinion survey conducted by
the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 72 percent of Americans think
that that the US should remove its military presence from Iraq "if
that's what a majority of Iraqis want." But few Americans are properly
informed about the significant extent to which Iraqis would like to see
the Americans leave.

In a similar vein, 76 percent of Americans think the US should
participate in the International Criminal Court and 71 percent think we
should go along with the Kyoto global warming accord, but relatively few
Americans know about the extent of America's official opposition to both
of those and other international programs that Americans actually like.

Another problem that is quite different from mass "stupidity" is mass
hopelessness. Even for many relatively informed Americans, there's a
shocking disconnect between what many of them believe and what they
think can be accomplished and are willing or feel able to do. Their
lives are often bewildering, commodified, overworked and sickening
chaos. They are living under the constant disabling shock therapy of
savage inequality and brazen steep hierarchy, the natural and intended
result of radical domestic neoliberalism (note to Europeans: don't let
this happen to you)

The main obstacle to a really broad-based progressive movement for
peace, democracy, and social justice in the U.S., I increasingly
suspect, is not mass loyalty to dominant institutions and their rulers.
It is instead traceable to the neo-liberal, corporate-imposed erosion of
the social democratic public spaces that once served as the forums in
which communities and peoples debated, analyzed, and participated in
political life.

We have witnessed in recent decades an unprecedented decline in popular
engagement, the process by which ordinary and non-affluent people assert
their interests and responsibility for their common destiny. The result:

privatization (consumerization and commodification) of American life,
with its concomitant sense that social action and responsibility are
futile propositions, stillborn by their very nature - the triumph of
capital over hope.

There is a broad, deep, skeptical, even cynical sense here that nothing
much can be done about existing social problems --- "The Wheel in the
Sky Keeps on Turning" (one of the few Journey songs I can still listen
to) --- and that the only reasonable solutions to societal difficulties
are to be found in the private realm, matters of purely personal
correction. The world has grown too complex --- too ossified --- to be
subject to meaningful collective agency. The resulting public vacuum is
filled by a new American imperial fascism, a right-handed plutocratic
state that steps in to pretend to provide the public service the social
democracy would provide in a civilized place.

Another key point regarding Europeans is that they have their own
interrelated reckonings to make with both their own ruling-classes and
with the imperial US ruling-class and that they are in a curious
strategic position to act against the empire. And here I'd like to
recommend perusal of the Marxist, world-systemic ruminations of Joseph
Halevi, Yanis Varoufakis, and Samir Amin in a recent book from Monthly
Review Press: Pox
Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York, NY: 2004).

These writers point out that the Europeans have a pivotal choice to make
between:

(1) a neo-liberal Atlanticist alliance with the in-fact declining United
States in the "collective imperialist" "core-state" subordination of the
rest of the world (what world systemic thinkers call the "periphery" and
"semi-periphery") and

(2) a more independent and social-democratic path of developing their
own domestic and regional economies in ways that enhance social justice
at home and greater economic, political, and even military autonomy from
the parasitic US.

Basically, these and other authors note, Europe stays mired in relative
deflation largely because its neoliberal elites have been convinced that
they must invest amounts of European surplus capital in the propping up
the American economy, whose voracious appetite for foreign capital
reflects the nation's simply stunning trade and payments deficits.

America is "the Global Minotaur," a mass consumer non-producer state
that totals up foreign IOUs like a junkie gathers needles. Foreign loans
and capital infusions "protect the U.S. financial system from a crisis
of domestic debt brought about by the unprecedented levels household and
corporate net debt" (Halevi and Varoufakis).

Europeans and others have tended to provide these infusions --- at great
cost to the development of their own societies and economies --- because
non-U.S. First World "elites" rely on the far flung US military empire
to keep the world safe for business and exploitation and because they do
not wish to be cut off from the massive US consumer market....or from
vital oil supplies the US controls through direct and indirect means.
And perhaps there is also here an intellectual problem....the
significant extent to which European intellectuals and business persons
have been infected by the US-hatched "neoliberal virus" (Amin), which
provides abstract justification for maximum capital mobility across
post-regulatory nation states.

But now the empire has overstretched its bounds, using its preponderant
military force to gain "exclusive access to the world's second-largest
oil fields" in what is certainly a brazen attempt (among other things)
to control more productive and dynamic core states and regions (Europe
and East Asia especially) that have much greater capacity for solid
economic and social development than the declining, parasitic,
debt-financed, post-industrial, dumbed-down, and
military-dependent/military-addicted US.

At the same time, Bushcons have tapped the "paranoid style" of fetus-
and bible-obsessed proto-fascist rebellion and used 9-11 (a Bushcon
security failure so great that many perhaps most people in the world
think that the Bush cabal actually carried the action out) to fan a deep
imperial bloodlust It has also granted massive tax cuts to the already
obscenely wealthy few.

The proto-fascism, which curiously targets the French for special
ridicule but leaves the equally anti-war Germans out of the discussion
(expressing a certain racist affection for perceived blond-haired
Nordics perhaps?), bodes rather poorly for the civilized international
cooperation that Europeans naturally want.

The tax cuts mean more U.S. debt and thus a deeper American insistence
upon European capital transfer, even while European economies struggle
with massive structural unemployment and chronic deflation.

Europeans: rail all you want about Americans' "stupidity" but please
also consider that you need to "come to terms with your own bourgeoisie"
(as Canadian professor Sam Gindin puts it in the aforementioned Monthly
Review
book) if we are all going to meaningfully confront the Empire. You
should press your elites to quit staving off the bankruptcy of American
capitalism...to turn off the spigot of capital even as the Bushcons try
to secure the last spigots of Persian Gulf oil. Push for a capital
strike. Tell your elites --- many of them already know --- that
participation in "collective imperialism" (Amin's term) under US
hegemony no longer serves their interests and that everyone in Europe
will benefit from a more democratic and independent path.

Please do not put it all on the crazy and "stupid" Americans. We are not
as dumb as some may think and of course we are not "one America" as
George W. Bush and Barack Obama like to proclaim but two, three and
indeed many Americas. On the other hand you can see the mess this nation
is in, the profound disabling of democracy that savage corporate-imposed
hierarchy and ruthless commodification has imposed. Take it from
me...this is a dangerous society.

Any limits that you in Europe can impose upon our masters' empire will
be greatly appreciated, for empire is a profoundly regressive and
repressive force in American domestic life and the obsession with
foreign enemies - both real and perceived - and frontiers has long
undercut the nation's ability to deal with problems of peace and justice
at home. The empire is the enemy of our domestic tranquility as well.

Paul Street is a social policy researcher in Chicago, IL. He is the
author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

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