Zero Sum Future

After three years of bloody blundering, Bush has finally gained traction in the Middle East.

It turns out that support of democratic movements — not mendacious bleating about WMDs, al Qaeda, and a permanent war on terror led by the United States — is the most effective way to bring our enemies and recalcitrant allies to heel in the Middle East.

Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt are all feeling the heat. Next up, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

And democracy is a two-edged sword that’s cutting us up on the left, as well.

I don’t think it’s enough to deride democracy, Bush-style as a cynical weapon of convenience, whereby money, media control and U.S. support are used to force some free market plutocrat down a country’s throat.

Even though I think it’s true.

Protesting that we’re the true lovers of democracy, and that lucky dog Bush happened to be in the right place at the right time once again as democracy eats at the foundation of Middle East autocracies doesn’t work for me.

And moving the goalposts by claiming that the conservative movement has failed, and Bush and the GOP have been reduced to implementing our agenda doesn’t cut it for me, either.

I don’t feel like a winner.

I feel like a progressive trapped in a world where the other side controls the money, the media, the courts, and the government, and doesn’t even have to worry about being unseated in an election anymore.

Democracy is making Bush and the forces that back him stronger, not weaker.

Don’t talk about winning in the long run.

The “long run” is waking up ten years from today realizing that Bush has used the eight years that the American electoral system — our democracy — gave him to intentionally bankrupt the government through tax cuts, Medicare reform, and — if he gets his way — Social Security privatization.

And realizing that at the same time corporations got big, multi-billion dollar payouts and private wealth and power has been protected and dispersed beyond the reach of America’s will and ability to regulate or tax, leaving the American middle class and its hollowed-out economy holding the bag.

That’s what the struggle’s about.

It’s not between the GOP and the Democrats.

It’s not between conservatives and liberals.

It’s not between cultural conservatives and the “reality-based community”.

It’s not between rich and poor.

It’s between the people who want to exploit our public institutions to protect private wealth, vs. those who want to see private interest to bow to the public good.

It’s between the nation-state and international capital.

In a way, it’s a struggle between the European model of peaceful coexistence between public and private wealth and expressed as soft power, and the GOP model, where the balance has tipped to the private side and hard power, a.k.a. “I may be mean and dumb but I’m rich and I’ve got a gun”.

And it’s a struggle about whether oil is a resource vital to national wealth and global well-being, or a militarily and politically vulnerable asset to be seized and exploited by the strongest.

A struggle which is played out in the Middle East as the U.S. explicitly attempts to destabilize the Middle East, and create conditions in which its intimidating — if ham-fisted — exercise of hard power trumps European diplomatic and economic accommodation as the decisive force.

I often wondered how the Bush/Cheney energy axis planned to cope with the impending exhaustion of petroleum resources.

Now I think its plan is 15 years of hell, to achieve one last, giant payday for the military/security/petroleum complex that has thirsted for the strategic and economic benefits of all that oil unfairly locked up by sandy, unfriendly, and/or undemocratic states.

We don’t deal with dictators anymore. We rob them. “Democracy” is one of the guns we hold them up with.

That means serial destabilization of regimes from Russia to China on the other side of the oil/military equation. American military power, global military reach, and disruptive client regimes like Japan and the ex-Soviet bloc countries allow us to put immense stress both on oil producers and the states that hope to compete with us.

Sovereign states are to be shattered through external threat, internal subversion, and democratic agitation, and become offshore havens under the control of business oligarchies that provide a free market safe haven for international corporations and shelter for the U.S. hard power military and intelligence machine.

Putin and OPEC bite the dust.

Oil is privatized, securitized, internationalized, its ownership and profits made available to investors and foreign corporations.

National control of oil in Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East evaporates just as the annual supply of oil shrinks and prices — and profits — skyrocket.

Undeserving sand-rich locals fume impotently as the oil is pumped out from under their feet into corporate tankers. Russia is Berlusconi-ized, as its oil becomes private property of local petro-plutocrats and their foreign accomplices instead of a national strategic asset. China’s pretensions to world power choke on the reality of scrambling to import over one million tons of oil per day in an ever-tightening market dominated by a hostile U.S. and its national and corporate proxies.

International capital enjoys its last hurrah, battening on windfall profits as the two-century reign of King Oil comes a close.

The rest of us will be collateral damage in the last race for oil profits both before and after the petroleum star that has lit our world consumes its last fuel and implodes.

Nation states that used democracy to reconcile labor and capital will become crucibles of chaos, as capital exploits its willingness and ability to flee to divide the electorate between hopeless dead-enders and feckless appeasers. Look for the EU’s attempt to walk the popular vs. capital tightrope to falter as businesses abandon Europe for deregulated, oil-boom markets in the emerging economies.

I don’t think what’s good for Exxon and Halliburton is going to be good for the people of the United States. The trickle-down is going to happen in India, “free China”, and places we probably haven’t even heard of yet — places with poor people, weak legal systems, free-market policies, pliant, welcoming governments, and eager business oligarchies.

Given the American example, I’m not buying in to any Panglossian progressivisim that tells me that any new, corporate-based affluence is going to bring us a better, fairer, more generous, or compassionate world.

We’ll just get more rich bastards ganging up with their buddies to fight more wars, grab more loot, and extort more privileges as they bounce between their global havens exempt from accountability and responsibility.

It almost — repeat almost — makes me nostalgic for the Cold War, when the looming challenge and example of the Evil Empire made us, well, less evil, in the areas of social justice and public welfare.

Well, we can either hope that Europe gets access to Russian or Middle East oil and saves the global democratic nation state system before the U.S. puts the oil chokehold on it and tries to undo the EU’s emerging social and economic dominance with hard-power destabilization…

Or stand by as a frightened and desperate world tries to pre-empt American hegemony with a financial euro-bomb that displaces the almighty dollar as the world’s reserve currency, just as Bush’s runaway deficits and burgeoning military adventures have made us most vulnerable to the titanic economic stresses that a 30%+ fall in the dollar’s value would bring us…

Or we can reconcile ourselves to a world where private wealth and power seizes control of democratic governments…

…or we can do something about it here.

“Something” means waking up to the dismaying realization that every center right democracy set up around the world that welcomes foreign investment is making our union, jobs, and economy more vulnerable to outsourcing and capital flight.

That a hardpower strategy of military power, globalized corporate pre-eminence, national economic weakness is trapping us in a zero-sum future in which only the destabilizing exercise of hard power at the expense of not just dictatorships but vulnerable, peace oriented economies and countries is the only way to ensure even transitory economic advantages.

That the end result of a campaign of hard-power U.S. hegemony is an international corporate class ready to withstand the hammer blow of post-petroleum economic collapse, at the expense of a populace and a nation that is helpless and divided.

That the hope for our nation lies in uniting and protecting our domestic economic interests, recognizing that the interests of people and capital have diverged, and that a hard power rampage abroad in service of corporate interests must be curtailed in favor of national economic security at home.

That perhaps what the left needs in order to regain ideological and political initiative is to exchange our traditional emphasis on expansion of rights and the social safety net and venture into the alien territory of national security and redefine the so-called national security debate as one between corporate greed and the national interest.

I don’t want to sit around hoping that some combination of Bush over-reach and euro-based economic defiance by the rest of the world brings America’s corporate masters to heel.

Or resign myself to the possibility that money, military power, and callous disregard will create a world that only an oil executive could love.

For Americans, pessimism and despair are not viable options.

When one country can shape the future of the world, the citizens of that country have not only the right — but the obligation — to decide what the shape of that future will be.

And I don’t believe a zero-sum world is the only future possible — or achievable.

Copyright 2005 Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.