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Is the American Empire and its associated neo-liberal institutions and narratives actually causing resources or potential capacities for living to be taken away from people who otherwise would have access to more of those things? Or are the poor merely multiplying under the protective, if miserable, umbrella of cheaper food, fiber, and medicine than would have been available to them otherwise, allowing them to exist when they otherwise never would have been born? It's not an easy question.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
And the space between neo-liberal policies and progressive-liberal policies is not really all that wide either. The institutional framework, I don't think, is the real problem. It's just the present political leadership that needs tweaking and the institutions of the empire allow for a wide range of peaceful means for doing so within the present framework. I.e., it's the path of least resistance.
I guess it's because if America really can be conceived of as an empire, that is as a transnational, institutionalized polity of some kind, then this means that the most effective arena for policy change is Washington -- it's core.
You assume that if nothing is done, the American empire will remain. It won't. Restoring the American empire to some semblance of sustainability will require active effort.
So in order to believe that the most effective arena for policy change in the periphery is Washington, you have to believe that the effort required to change policy in the periphery is less than the effort required to change policy in Washington plus the effort that must be expended to restore the American empire, plus the opportunity cost of the time lost between core policy propagating through the periphery, compared to changing policy directly in the periphery, minus the probability that the core resumes functioning on its own in time to salvage the empire.
We can quantify the time it takes for policy to propagate from Washington to Bruxelles, almost to the year, by looking at when Washington, resp. Bruxelles forgot how to resolve a systemic bankruptcy. Call it ten years (from the .com bust until today). Give or take a few years. Changing policy in Washington is likely to be harder than changing policy in Bruxelles, if for no other reason then because the American constitution is less amenable to grassroot efforts (and because the American government has far more deeply institutionalised corruption). Which in turn means that the imperial core is unlikely to resume sanity-based policies on its own. Add the effort required to restore the American empire to some semblance of viability, and the whole thing starts looking rather open-and-shut, unless you happen to be an American and therefore have to live with the America that actually unfolds.
the space between neo-liberal policies and progressive-liberal policies is not really all that wide either.
Well, compared to the space between Leninism and neo-liberalism, I suppose you might say that.
In practise, you'd have to purge half the top-tier civil servants, who have been drafted from the school of thought that grants corporations more rights than individuals, views paid-for speech as being equivalent to free speech and subscribes to fantasy-based economics. And then you'd have to destroy the neoliberals' sources of funding, academic support, media cover and intellectual foundations (OK, the last bit is easy enough), to make sure we won't be having this same discussion thirty years down the road. (The last bit was where American Keynesianism failed - it was insufficiently thorough in purging pockets of potential revanchists. It is noteworthy that the neoliberals have done their best to avoid repeating that mistake.)
The neo-fascist model is one where 1-2% of the population can survive at the expense of the rest. This is the sole foundation and aim of the current American empire.
And it works, and will continue to work, at least until such time that the Earth itself is barely habitable.
It might even survive for a while after that.
But that's a dispiriting and fantastically stupid excuse for something that calls itself a civilisation.
While the right enjoys its fantasies of Social Darwinism, the reality is that pure Darwinian competition leads to animal idiocies. Evolutionary competition is stupid. It has no strategy, no goals, and no predictive horizon longer than the next meal, the next pecking order status play, or the next fuck.
In comparison, the progressive model of government is strategic. The aim is the full expression of a population's creative, intellectual and physical talents.
Education, food management, social mobility, and wealth redistribution aren't just moral issues, they're also practical strategies. Done properly they create dynamic, diverse, inventive and resilient societies that are capable of innovation, strategic intelligence and far-sighted goal setting.
Neo-fascism in any form always regresses into infantile fantasies of omnipotence and practical disaster. To deal with reality effectively you have to accept that reality exists, and that's something the neo-fascists are simply unable to do - which is why their future prospects are so limited.
It's not just that they harm other populations, but that they're incapable of surviving without destroying themselves.
The neo-fascist model is one where 1-2% of the population can survive at the expense of the rest. This is the sole foundation and aim of the current American empire. And it works, and will continue to work, at least until such time that the Earth itself is barely habitable.
But it is less than perfectly clear that it works well enough that it can sustain a society that is capable of projecting political and military power far beyond its own borders.
The essence of the fascist mindset is extreme hierarchy. It's all about relative gradations and relative resource use.
Mugabe in Zimbabwe doesn't care that his country is a festering joke. As long as he has food on his table, clean uniforms to parade around in, a few guns and a prostitute or three, the starvation and horror are either irrelevant to him.
Who knows? He may even enjoy them.
The point is that this kind of implosion is inevitable in fascist economies. But it doesn't matter to the winners, because they don't care about the total size of the pie as long as they can maintain some semblance of being special and important, and they're personally comfortable.
It's the ironic poverty of fascism that makes it such a threat. It's implacably and relentlessly hostile to stable, genuine prosperity.
Does it need to?
If it wants to motivate the rest of the world to care about what happens in the US, beyond the fate of one's immediate friends (and the sort of general but rather vague pity most people feel for sub-Saharan Africa), then yes.
Or are the poor merely multiplying under the protective, if miserable, umbrella of cheaper food, fiber, and medicine than would have been available to them otherwise, allowing them to exist when they otherwise never would have been born? It's not an easy question.
It is not that hard a question. The demographic transition has increased population in mercantilistic, late feudal, capitalistic, communistic, colonial, colonised, fascist, mixed and finally neoliberal economies. To put it down to the American Empire seems a bit odd.
santiago:
Is the American Empire and its associated neo-liberal institutions and narratives actually causing resources or potential capacities for living to be taken away from people who otherwise would have access to more of those things?
If we look at the actual actions of liberalisation on food security, things like this keeps popping up:
CADTM - Famine in Malawi Exposes IMF Negligence
The original sin seems to lie with the IMF and the European Union, which repeatedly called for Malawi's grain reserve to be privatized and run on a "cost-recovery basis." This resulted in the 1999 spin-off of NFRA from ADMARC, with a mandate to maintain adequate buffer stocks of grain and to protect Malawians against fluctuations in food production, availability and prices.
When demand destruction means death, it is hard to argue that the population on average will prosper. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
This sound observation actually argues my point exactly. We have at least two, notable, dramatic collapses of large-scale institutional regimes in the non-American dominated world. China's Great Leap Forward, which regrouped the rural countryside into communes and, as official Chinese scholars themselves have come to recently admit, caused the great famine that killed tens of millions of people. And we also have the disastrous effects of the neo-liberal shock therapy performed on the formerly Communist soviet states. In both cases collapse of the reigning institutional paradigms, and both of them very much imperialist paradigms, led to tragedies of enormous dimensions for millions of people.
Speaking abstractly, it's only a good thing when an empire falls if the harm being done to people by that empire is truly egregious and much worse than what would occur if it collapses. I'm not sure that the "American empire" is really all that bad, even if we can find lots of bad things about it, especially compared to what could happen to a lot of people without it or if there wasn't first a better institutional framework to replace or overtake it.
I suppose if you're a vampire squid you might have a different view of the process to the rest of us.
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