Partying at Davos

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.”

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The liberal blogosphere did their absolute best over the weekend, launching a tsumani of faxes, emails, and phone calls to senator’s offices pleading with them to stop Alito.

They got their answer yesterday. Alito will be confirmed with barely a hint of protest. Oh, a few liberal senators mumbled dissent, but for the most part Democrats were compliant and agreeable to Republican demands.

Had it not been for the liberal blogosphere we wouldn’t even have gotten the pretend opposition that we did. Kos, AmericaBlog, CrookandLiars and many others did everything they could to mobilize against Alito.

Why did this happen? There’s really only one reason, one that liberals and progressives are finally facing. Congressional Democrats do not oppose Republicans because, for the most part, they agree with them. It’s not that they are dim, or timid - rather they do not fight the neocons because they generally have no objections to what neocons are doing.

The ruling class is moving to the right as the populace is moving to the left. Beltway Democrats have abandoned their base, not the other way around.

That’s the lesson to be learned. The organizing opportunity that then presents itself is that large numbers of former moderates are getting radicalized real fast now.

[tags] Alito [/tags]

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Via DJ Mitchell

“It seemed to me then and even more so as I write two years later that we, Americans, have difficulty envisioning ourselves embroiled in a cycle of violence. The acts of 9/11 were viewed as unwarranted provocation that came out of the blue. And indeed they were. But it is also true that these acts can be equally situated not as isolated events but as part of a cycle with a history of actions, reactions, and counteractions.

Only when understood in the broader pattern, which in the short term can be very difficult to visualize, is it possible to see that how we choose to respond has consequences and implications in terms of a wider, historic pattern. Through our response, we choose to transcend or enter and sustain the cycle of violence. For the most part since 9/11 the leaders of the United States have chosen the route of perpetuation.

In less than two years as a nation we have engaged ourselves in two land-based wars costing billions of dollars. And by all current accounts, the route of choosing violent response has not increased domestic or international security. It has succeeded in fostering the cycle” — John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination

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