A new kind of domination

Submitted by Michael (United States), Jul 10, 2008 at 22:03

Jeff, I have to take issue with some of your positions. First, about the US intolerance of political opposition, you say "Your response did not explain how it is so many socialist countries exist in Europe, freely elect communists to positions of power and continue to be friends and allies..."

This relies on a special definition of socialism, which I take to mean any nation having anything like a safety net of social programs. That definition, of course, identifies the USA itself (and nearly every country on earth except Russia) as being socialist. I would also ask you to identify any actual communists who have been elected to positions of power in European countries. I am aware of none. The sense of my comment was that we would tolerate no country in opposition to our right to economically dominate the world, through trade agreements and the rest of the neoliberal net we have cast.

Thus we do not tolerate countries like Cuba or Venezuela even though they are militarily nonbelligerent. Whereas we have no opinion on odious countries that do not threaten our economic status quo, like Sudan, Zimbabwe or Myanmar. And in fact a few of our clients (think Kosovo) are very serious thugs. You also say, of 9/11, that "The government of Afghanistan was highly complicit in that attack". But no one, not even Bill Kristol, has ever made such a claim.

The plot was hatched by Saudis, in Hamburg. There was no link to the Taliban ever established or even suggested. The only thing they were complicit in was allowing Al Qaeda training camps to operate on their soil. And I might remind you that those training camps were founded by the same mujahedeen our CIA and Spec Fours trained against the Russians, back in 1980.

If you want an intriguing link, try looking into the activities of Pakistan's ISI. These people are decidedly not our friends. In fact, they were the ones who gave the Bomb to Libya and North Korea. Yet we are cozy with them, for reasons not to be found in the pages of the NY Times. As to your central thesis, your definition of colonialism is a hundred years out of date.

Economic domination today is largely a matter of embroiling a poor country in debt and using that debt to influence policy. Add a bit of instability, such as is easily done in unregulated capital markets, and they're in your pocket. Next come the demands for structural adjustment, and they no longer have control over their own government. It's a very practised move, and has been executed many times. What we do is not classic, 19th century colonialism but something far more sophisticated.

If we must give it a name, neoliberalism is a good one. Finally, if you could, name one of our "colonies" that has banned US agricultural imports. I know of none. In fact, we have come to dominate world ag sales through trade agreements that do not allow them to erect barriers to our products. Thus we can sell them massively subsidised wheat, corn, rice and cotton for below the cost their own farmers can grow it, running their domestic ag programs out of business.

I do, however, agree with your sentence "If the US is an empire, it's unlike any that has existed in all of human history." It is in fact something totally new, that did not exist before 1945.

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