[Peace-discuss] Supremacy and murder

[C G Estabrook]

Supremacy and murder

It's a fundamental and not always innocent mistake to say that the US is killing people in MENA (Mideast and North Africa) for white supremacy. We're doing so for the economic supremacy of the American one percent.

Racism can be a convenient cover story. (Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris - “it’s human nature to hate those you have injured.”)

In response to the assault of neoliberalism in the 1970s, American liberals shamefully chose to stop noticing the class basis of US imperialism, which they had painfully learnt in Vietnam:

'By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war.'

But the business community and then the government counterattacked in the 1970s, notably among partisans of Israel, who feared that US war weariness would interfere with US military support for the Zionist state. Thus neoconservatism was born.

The broader response was neoliberalism - the conscious, calculated campaign by US business leaders against the social democratic traditions that began in the New Deal of the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s. Social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s in the US sought to lessen the rigors of capitalism for the majority by means of supports such as Social Security and Medicare.

The strategy of neoliberalism was to use the power of government to protect and enhance the return on capital; to free capital from government restraints, not to free the economy from government, as 19th-century Liberalism had proposed. Neoliberalism therefore depended on limiting democracy in government.

(See "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies," a 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission - the crisis being, in the eyes of this international business group, that too much democracy had developed in the capitalist world during 'the Sixties' and had to be reversed.)

The principal neoliberal tools, from the 1970s on, were (a) globalization (in search of low-wage platforms around the world, with the concomitant de-industrialization of the US economy) and (b) financialization of the economy (the balance of power shifting from industrial corporations to financial corporations).

The effects were immediate and lasting: wages in the US, which had risen along with productivity 1945-73, have been flat since 1973, although productivity has continued to rise. And the concentration of wealth has increased, and at an accelerating rate, while median household income continued to decline, throughout the Obama years.

—CGE