A Week That Seemed Like Years
The neoconservative clique that had pushed to be at the controls of the Iraq War had shown an alarming inability to anticipate adverse reactions to their group-think driven initiatives. Exhibit A in this regard in Iraq was the decision, shortly after the dramatic success of the Shock and AweTM invasion, to disband the Iraqi Army virtually overnight. Thousands of soldiers walked away from their barracks carrying their AK-47s with them and fuel an insurrection that cost the peace. In spite of this record, when Barrack Obama became president the neoconservatives were welcomed into the Democratic administration’s foreign policy tent. As for why he did this, it was probably at the request of the same predators he rescued from the pitchforks.Lenin once said “Years go by and they seems like weeks, but once in a while a week goes by that seems like years.” The week that began Sunday March 20 was of the latter kind. America has been an empire since at least the 1850s and its reach expanded right up until this year. But in January 2022 the USA reached too far. A month earlier Russia had submitted two draft treaties for consideration by the US and NATO that explicitly stated her red lines in the wake of decades of provocations by the west, including NATO expansion to its borders and unilaterally tearing up arms control treaties dating as far back as the Reagan administration. On January 26 America formally blew off Russia’s insistence her concerns be taken seriously. On February 24 those other means began in the form of a “Special Military Operation” in which Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine. The United States responded with the most draconian sanctions yet imposed, as well as by seizing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian assets outside its borders. America also attempted to cajole and coerce countries around the world to do likewise. All NATO members signed up, as did most but not all other western and central European nations, as did the three non-European, five-eyes countries. The rest of the world, however, not so much. Nevertheless America was smugly confident the sanctions and seizures would quickly bring the Russian society and economy to its knees.
Observers around the world expected counter economic sanction announcements by Russia, but they never came. What they got instead was a classic Jujitsu move that turned the sanctions and seizures against those who had imposed them`. Among the sanctions was the cut-off of Russia’s access to American and European international banks, making it all but impossible for Russia to get paid in dollars or Euros for sales abroad. At the top of the list of Russian exports are oil and gas, followed by numerous minerals and agricultural inputs and products. Early in the pivotal week Russia announced as of April 1 all its gas sales to “unfriendly countries” must be paid in Rubles. A few days later a Ruble/Rupee arrangement was announced regarding its gas and oil exports to India. These moves, coupled with the Eurasian Economic Union’s (EAEU) formal announcement it would stand up an alternative international payment system that will bypass the USA controlled SWIFT system, mark the first declarations of independence from the embrace of America’s financial imperialism.
Regardless of how the conflict on the ground in Ukraine plays out and is settled, from the grand strategic standpoint of the United States the situation brings to mind the words of Emperor Hirohito during his first radio address to his people in the closing days of World War II: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage . . .” Obviously America’s situation today is an order of magnitude less dire than was Japan’s on August 15 1945. Nevertheless the blow-off of Russia’s insistence that America take her vital security interests seriously has already proven to be a world-historical own goal, and the consequences have only just begun to play out. Just how severe they become and how rapidly they occur remains to be seen.
Do you see all the countries in the vast gray areas on the map above? Together with Russia which is shown in red, they constitute at least 75% of the world’s population, and almost all of them have been held back in their efforts to provide prosperity for their people by the predatory tentacles of American financial imperialism. As soon as competitors with the SWIFT system are ready for prime time, which they will be soon, we can expect those gray countries to start using them. Thus begins the end of nearly two centuries of American imperialism. How it plays out will depend on how strongly and for how long America fights the tide of history, and the levels of predation emerging competitor countries exhibit in their relations with America’s vanishing de facto colonies.
American imperialism has been primarily indirect and financial in nature, but with a military mailed fist available for when subservience was deemed insufficient. The main exceptions occurred during the 1890s first when US agribuisness interests it incited a coup in Hawaii and annexed it as a territory, followed soon thereafter by acquiring several former colonies of Spain in a brief war. Until World War II American imperialism was largely limited to the western hemisphere and islands in the Pacific ocean. After that conflict American imperialism went on steroids. It was able to do this because it was the only major combatant whose industry and society was physically unscathed by the conflict, and also the only one in a strong financial condition. As the war neared its end the USA convened the Bretton Woods conference to plan a financial regime for after the war. Because the USA was holding the high cards, the two major institutions that were created at the conference, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were tools of American interests and remain so today. America’s financial empire got a further boost in early 1970s by the combined effects of the severance of the dollar/gold peg in 1971 and the fallout from the Yom Kippur War two years later. This enabled American financiers to maneuver the dollar into the role of international reserve currency in place of gold. Finally, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating circa 1990, Wall Street pushed to extend its ambit throughout the former USSR’s sphere of influence as well. These stories are well told by Walter LaFeber, Michael Hudson and, for a darker side of it all since World War II, John Perkins (See references below).
There are two intertwined policy categories that are vital to the health and safety to all of the people in a country. These are the structure and rules of the country’s political economy, and international relations. In a previous post entitled “The Two Big Dough Parties” we showed that at the outset of his administration president Bill Clinton turned political-economic policy to the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, and by the time he left office eight years later the last vestiges of New Deal regulation of the financial sector had been dismantled or emasculated. However even as recently as 2002 when the AUMF bill for the Iraq War, a project supported by all of the top three Big Dough communities – FIRE (finance-insurance-real estate), oil and gas, and the MICCIMATTC (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Think-Tank-Complex) – came before the Congress the majority of Democratic House members and 40% of their colleagues in the Senate voted against it.
Just as the deregulation of the savings and loan sector in the early 1980s had unleashed years of financial malfeasance later in the decade, Clinton’s dismantling of the last New Deal pillars of financial regulation led to a similar frenzy centered in FIRE sector in the first decade of the 2000s. Only this time instead of investigations that led to over 1,000 prosecutions, the newly elected president Barrack Obama convened a meeting of Wall Street poobahs and told them, “I’m the only one standing between you and the pitchforks.” And indeed he did. He stopped serious federal probes before they started, and threw sand in the gears of state efforts to do so. The USA’s 44th president had made it clear there was no longer any difference between the two legacy parties on the political-economic policy basket. They were both all in on the predatory neoliberalism the basics of which were installed during the Reagan administration and the superstructure by Clinton. In the end the number of convictions for the millions of instances of perjury, forgery and fraud throughout the entire housing mortgage banking system could be counted on one hand, and those were of deck-hand level people.
The neoconservative clique that had pushed to be at the controls of the Iraq War had shown an alarming inability to anticipate adverse reactions to their group-think driven initiatives. Exhibit A in this regard in Iraq was the decision, shortly after the dramatic success of the Shock and AweTM invasion, to disband the Iraqi Army virtually overnight. Thousands of soldiers walked away from their barracks carrying their AK-47s with them and fuel an insurrection that cost the peace. In spite of this record, when Barrack Obama became president the neoconservatives were welcomed into the Democratic administration’s foreign policy tent. As for why he did this, it was probably at the request of the same predators he rescued from the pitchforks.
Thus did president Obama did take the final step needed to meld the Republican and Democratic parties into the Republocrat Party. Its members think they belong to political parties, but on the matters that really count for all citizens’ well being, they’re just two guilds of stenographers fighting over the front row seats to take dictation from the paymasters who fund their campaigns. And in 21st century America what those Big Doughners want for their money is not what the rest of us want, and need, for our well being. We can think of the Congressional and Presidential election campaigns held every two years as circus performances in which the center ring, in which policies regarding the crucial well-being issues are decided, is enshrouded by sound proof curtains. The stenographic guilds avoid discussing these if at all possible and focus instead on peripheral issues, especially ones that are hot buttons for various sectors of society.
So here we are in the third decade of the 21st century, and we citizens of the United States have a federal government that is not governing in our interests. Well, maybe that’s an overstatement. The “trickle down” prosperity promised by the promoters of the predatory ultra-neoliberal regime that’s been stood up over the past half century proved to be “deluge up” instead. The gazillionaires at the receiving end of that torrent and their high level minions are doing well indeed. For many of the rest of us it’s been a gradual decline, or in many cases a catastrophic collapse of our ability to provide for ourselves.
Now another storm is moving toward us thanks to the neoconized Democratic Party foreign policy establishment. It popped above the horizon in 2014 when Asst. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland directed a 2014 coup d'état in Ukraine, the first stage in the long-time neocon wet dream of subduing and dismembering the Russian Federation. Eight years later this has led directly to the cusp of the dismembering American financial imperialism.
Not that this would be a bad thing. Bismarck once said the task of the statesman was to put his ear to the ground, listen for the hoof beats of the horse of history, determine where he was and what direction he was running, and be prepared so when he comes by you can jump on his back and hang on for dear life. The steed was pawing at the turf as the Great War came to a close, but a quarter century later after the end of World War II was in full gallop. By the end of the 1960s overt colonialism was mostly a thing of the past. However he covert American variety lived on and proliferated, justified to its citizens by the Red Menace, but serving the interests of the Big Three Big Doughner sectors: Wall Street, mineral resources, and the MICCIMATTC. The demise of the Soviet Union revealed American imperialism had become a self-licking ice cream cone.
The next few months are going to become increasingly dangerous and the peril is likely to continue for several years, not least because America’s political system in the 21st century is so far failing the vast majority of the country’s citizens. Our wealthy elites know this; otherwise they wouldn’t be building redoubts in decommissioined missile silos, New Zealand and Patagonia. When candidates and flacks of the two dominant parties guilds tell us a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote, they are wrong. The wasted vote is one for a candidate who takes Big Doughnations thinking when she’s elected she’ll make a difference.
So, Vote No to Big Dough. Especially in the nomination phase when there’s a No Big Dough candidate for one of the major “parties.”
Further reading:
Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance by Michael Hudson
The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 By Walter LaFeber
The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins