Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 22, 2022
by Tony Wikrent
Buffalo mass shooting
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-16-2022]
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Real Scarcity Informed Buffalo Shooter’s Racist Conspiracy
[Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 5-18-2022]
Addressing this violence, though, also requires considering the role of scarcity — not a conspiracy theory, but a very real system of extreme inequality and ecological destruction. It is a system in which the most wealthy and powerful continue to see their wealth and power grow — at the expense of the masses. Faced with actual strained resources and environmental calamity, some of these forsaken people are turning to dark fantasies like the “great replacement theory” to make sense of it all.
It’s Time To Talk About Capitalism — The shooting in Buffalo spotlights the taboo topic we must discuss: the link between hypercapitalism and racism.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook, May 16, 2022 [The Lever]
Particularly in the U.S. — where the socialist branch of the labor movement that brought us the eight-hour workday, the weekend, and Social Security was crushed in the McCarthy era and never recovered — we must start explaining the virtues of worker control over production and worker power in politics, and how it addresses the problem we face: The rich make every economic decision in society, while treating workers as subhuman.
“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children,” King said.
The one percent — like Rupert Murdoch, the misanthropic owner of Fox News, and TV host Tucker Carlson — uses racism to get a portion of the white 99 percent to act against their own economic interests.
Strategic Political Economy
Who is leading the United States to war?
[Monthly Review, via Mike Norman Economics 5-20-2022]
This article comes to three conclusions: first, in the Biden administration, two foreign policy elite groups that used to compete against each other, liberal hawks and neoconservatives, have merged strategically, forming the most important foreign policy consensus within the elite echelon since 1948 and bringing the country’s war policy to a new level; second, in consideration of long-term interests, the big bourgeoisie in the United States has reached a consensus that China is a strategic rival, and has established solid support for its foreign policy; and third, due to the design of the U.S. Constitution, the expansion of the far-right forces, and the sheer monetization of elections, the so-called democratic institutions of checks and balances are completely incapable of restraining the belligerent policy from spreading..
The Merging of Belligerent Foreign Policy Elites
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of U.S. unilateralism, the neoconservatives entered the mainstream in U.S. foreign policy with their thought leader, Paul Wolfowitz, who was once an aide to Henry Jackson. In 1992, just a few months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Wolfowitz introduced his Defense Policy Guidance, which explicitly advocated a permanent unipolar position for the United States to be created through the expansion of U.S. military power into the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union and along all its perimeters, with the object of preventing the reemergence of Russia as a great power. The unipolar U.S.-led “grand strategy”, through the projection of military force, served to guide the foreign policies of George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, along with Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. The first Gulf War was made possible, in large part, due to the Soviet weakness. This was followed by the U.S./NATO military dismemberment of Yugoslavia. After 911, the Bush Jr. administration’s foreign policy was completely dominated by the neoconservatives, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
While they both advocated foreign military interventions, there are two historic differences between liberal hawks and neoconservatives. First, liberal hawks believed that the United States should influence the UN and other international institutions to carry out military intervention, while neoconservatives intended to ignore multilateral institutions. Second, liberal hawks sought military intervention alongside U.S.-led Western allies, while neoconservatives were not afraid to conduct unilateral military operations and violate anything resembling international laws.
The Return of a Criminal Neocon: Why does the foreign-policy and journalistic establishment still welcome Elliott Abrams?
Eric Alterman, May 20, 2022 [The American Prospect]
Post-Afghanistan and Ukraine, neocons have attempted to seize an opportunity to return themselves to the center of foreign-policy debate, now that (maybe) people don’t remember Iraq so well. Abrams, who literally has never met a potential U.S. (or Israeli) military action for which he did not cheerlead (and simultaneously accuse its opponents of lily-livered cowardice), showed up to argue that the nearly 40 percent of world military spending we account for is far too little….
Some neocons have shown a willingness to reconsider their previous errors in light of their politics having led to Trump. Max Boot gets most of the honors in this category. (William Kristol is in a sort of purgatory for acting like he now knows he was wrong about pretty much everything, but would just as soon move on. I wrote a sort of scorecard on this point back in 2009.) But Abrams, perhaps the man who needed to do more than anyone else alive to repudiate his past views, is sticking to his rhetorical (and metaphorical) guns. This would almost be funny in the way that Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz’s constant brownnosing of Trump is almost funny. Abrams, however, is particularly problematic because he continues to be taken seriously by most of the members of the mainstream media and what remains of the foreign-policy establishment. (He is after all a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, among his other appointments.) Yet not only has he been demonstrably wrong about virtually every major issue since he was a “child prodigy,” but he was also convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal while holding the very position that Nordlinger thinks ought to recommend him….
Well, it’s been said, not by me, that “where there is no vision, the people perish,” and vision on the left as far as foreign policy has been in decidedly short supply. Fortunately, we now have two prescient pieces in Foreign Affairs by Bernie Sanders’s foreign-policy guru (and Altercation good friend and long-ago American Prospect intern) Matt Duss. Following up on his 2020 piece, “U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on Terror,” Duss’s new contribution lays the groundwork for a policy that is both hard-headed and soft-hearted; providing a framework for the rest of us to think about individual places and issues that elude simple slogans. In the article entitled “The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy,” Duss recognizes that Russia’s war against Ukraine requires a “paradigm shift” in our approach to the world, and credits the Biden administration with handling the crisis well so far. But taking us well beyond just holding NATO together (or further expanding it), he seeks to locate how it might be possible to actually apply the principles to which our politicians so frequently pay tribute in rhetoric while ignoring them in practice. I cannot do justice to all, or really any, of Duss’s proposals in this space except to say that if you read these two articles, you will come away with the single best discussion of what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy and how it might possibly be repaired.
