US economy and war

[warch]

George Monbiot has written two articles focusing on US economic globalism as a potential cause of war in Iraq. I find them interesting.

Too much of a good thing

Here's one bit:
The underlying problem the United States confronts is the one which periodically afflicts all successful economies: the over-accumulation of capital. Excessive production of any good -- be it cars or shoes or bananas -- means that, unless new markets can be found, the price of that product falls and profits collapse.Just as it was in the early 1930s, the US is suffering from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched. This problem has been developing in the US since 1973. It has now tried every available means of solving it and, by doing so, maintaining its global dominance.The only remaining, politically viable option is war.

Heres a link to the follow up article Out of the wreckage that poses some potentially positive, but unplanned outcomes from US war action.

What do you think?

[warch]

This is an interesting bit from Out of the Wreckage:
By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term, corporate interests, the United States is, paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the Second World War, have permitted the US to develop its international commercial and political interests more effectively than it could have done alone. The institutions through which it has worked - the Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US, as it is already beginning to do,to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission, in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it.Effective resistance would create the political space in which their citizens could begin to press for a new, more equitable multilateralism.

I wonder what that would look like?

[Undertoad]

Monbiot's starting point seems to be that private industry is by definition tyrannical.

So when he talks about "construction of empire" and "imperial designs" and such, we aren't reading what he is thinking.

It would be helpful to compare what actual empire and imperialism mean. Historically, a powerful nation gains some advantage, usually military, and uses it to completely overrun and dominate another nation. That means the people in that other nation become subjects - not citizens - to the new empire. They may have their culture completely removed by force. They may become slaves to the conquerors. They certainly don't set the rules; if lucky they are too far to be effectively controlled as a colony, and only suffer abusive taxation and such. If really unlucky they may be decimated.

Monbiot is a Brit. Having grown up in, um, "old Europe" where this is what is meant by empire and imperialism, of COURSE Monbiot is dead frightened of it, and hey - of COURSE the French are too. And PART of the reason why is that they live in countries and cultures that actually did all that stuff! They are mortified by their own history.

And it was only a few generations ago, in fact. So they've got this huge monkey on their back, because part of their history is having the monkey of REAL empire on their back, when they had to be dealt a lesson in morality by the likes of Gandhi (because they didn't learn it from Jefferson and Washington).

Is that what the worst-case scenario is with American force? No. The very worst case scenario is that tw's dream of Bush's doctrine being Democracy as a new kind of manifest destiny is TRUE, and at the end of the day the US is not some sort of empire maintaining itself with guns, but a trading partner with a ton of free people who have jobs and a future and lots of money to spend on stuff.

Could we fuck it up? Yeah, that's human nature. But I for one am not moved by the leftovers of British shame. Empire means something quite different to us - that's what Europe doesn't understand. We don't take people over. We liberate them and then they get to choose what they want.

[Undertoad]

Oh yeah, and I can't pass this up:

Just as it was in the early 1930s, the US is suffering from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched.

This is just so much nonsense as a precursor to war that I'm calling shenanigans. And he's saying this condition has been building since 1973? Stop, stop, please stop.

There are a lot of people who want there to be some weird, mysterious, inexplicable problem with free economies that causes them to implode or not work right or demand war and stuff. They come up with something really complicated and call it plausible, and too many people buy it. The landfills are full of their various theories. It would be funny if the graveyards nearby weren't full of the purged people who were victims of tyrannical governments who used those various theories for their excuses.

Meanwhile, I await evidence of this dysfunctional US economy in the form of, you know, economic data.

[99 44/100% pure]

Originally posted by Undertoad
. . .There are a lot of people who want there to be some weird, mysterious, inexplicable problem with free economies that causes them to implode or not work right or demand war and stuff. . . .

The only weird, mysterious, inexplicable problem with free economies is that one has never truly existed anywhere on the face of the planet, so we have yet to gather any empirical economic data to support or argue against the benefits of such a system. While the U.S. model comes the closest to a "free market" of all the supposed free economies in existence, the 'invisible hand' of government intervention is so heavy in our system that a true economist couldn't call ours a free market.

While I alternately shudder and laugh at some of these governmental interventions, I doubt many of us would want to live in a truly "free market" economy. We value our health and safety too much.