Class rule
Bob Morris @ Jan 31st 2006 09:03 - Category: Socialism ;
In America, as in most places, the party of Davos is bipartisan. It includes Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, Robert Rubin and Don Rumsfeld, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush is also a member, but he doesn’t like to travel). John Kerry is quoted as having called himself a “Davos” man.
Indeed, without reference to economic class it is impossible to explain why Democratic elites championed NAFTA, the WTO and the other instruments of corporate protectionism, which traded away the interests of its blue-collar industrial base in favor of the GOP constituencies in Wall Street and red-state agri-business. Nor is it possible to explain why Washington is indifferent to a relentlessly rising trade deficit, and the resulting foreign debt that has put the country’s future in the hands of the central bank of China, while the Pentagon simulates war games with China as the enemy.
It’s because the elites continue to get wealthier by pursuing their class interests at the expense of the rest of us.
The media language we use to talk to each other about globalization hides its class structure. The press consistently talks about national “interest” without defining who exactly is getting what.
But the China threat is in fact another global business partnership – this one between commissars who supply the cheap labor and the United States and other foreign capitalists who supply the technology and two-thirds of the capital used to finance China’s exports. The rest of the world calls this “neo-liberalism,” a term unknown among America’s media “internationalists.”
The politics of the global marketplace are a one- party system.
Davos’ chief champion – the U.S. governing class – is in trouble. The opposition to the War in Iraq has demonstrated the limits of America’s willingness to send its children to die in order to force the world’s cultures into one vast shopping mall. And the looming crisis of America’s foreign debt will cramp the ability of our elites to use the countries’ economic power to support their global corporate backers. The erosion of the American social contract – already being reflected in stagnant wages, financial insecurity and collapsing health care system – could soon force the governing class to pay more attention to Bloomington, Illinois than to Baghdad, Iraq.
Link via Politizine, who comments
The people who control the world?
It isn’t often that I post entire articles here which aren’t written by me. But this piece just says it all, doesn’t it?
And people think there isn’t a conspiracy to run the world … they aren’t hiding, are they?
That a moderate Democratic blog is linking to an article that essentially is Marxist class analysis shows both the radicalization happening now in the country and the power of Marxist analysis, which can explain the seemingly baffling - like why Beltway Democrats are so compliant.
A colleague who makes over $100,000 tells me the higher-ups at his firm having been, in their short-sighted greed, screwing them so badly that “they’re driving even me, Mr. Moderate, into the arms of the Marxists.”
