The wasteful economy

I was reading the papers today and I was reminded that he US is a huge military power. In fact it is a very militaristic society. I can't really recall back when I was a kid growing up in Britain, this obsession with the military, and I grew up in a military family; my father spent 3 years and 9 months working for Mitsubishi in Japan. He was taken there after being captured during the taking of Hong Kong at the beginning of the war. Of course, I have been away a long time so things might be different now.

I think the US supplies about 46% of the world's arms. I see it is now considering sending missiles to the Saudi's to defend against Iran. It wants to put missiles in Poland to protect that country against an Iranian attack, something no one outside of the US believes of course. It has bases all over the world and wants to put missiles in Lithuania.

On it's own border with Mexico, a semi-colonial country with which it shares a 2000 mile border, a country with a huge working class, it has almost 15,000 border patrol agents, expensive footprint detecting technology and unmanned aerial vehicles. The border patrol's budget has increased 50% in a year in order to pay for this and stands now at $3.4bn for 2008. It has constructed miles of walls and fencing to keep the "foreigners" out, many of them part of the million or so Mexican farmers that NAFTA displaced, unable to compete with the highly centralized and industrialized US agricultural industry.

When you think of the massive waste in capitalist society, vast sums of money, valuable resources both human and technological that could be used to eradicate hunger and want a thousand times over. The capitalist class has shown that they can no longer govern society. The tension between nation states, an inherent aspect of capitalism that led to the two world wars, and all the wars in between and since, has been increasing since the collapse of Stalinism and the bi-polar world. The existence of the old Soviet Union created a temporary unity, a lull for a while in the conflict between separate nation states competing for global market share. The rise of China and Russia in particular is most disturbing to US imperialism and its European allies.

The Financial Times editorial today commented that we are living in "a world of extreme moral hazard". The Anglo American bourgeois are concerned. Their financial system is in crisis, what is referred to as the US model. Millions of Americans are losing their homes, millions more cannot get adequate health care. It is inevitable that a crisis in the stretched US military will burst in to the open at some point as the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are born by a small percentage of US families; suicides in the military continue to rise and are higher than in civilian society. The US electoral system is perhaps the most rotten and corrupt in the "free world" much shunned by a huge section of the US population who have withdrawn from the political arena entirely having to choose each time as they will in a month or so between one or another of the candidates big business puts forward.

The influence of US imperialism on the world stage is declining as best exampled by its inability to do anything but whine about Russia's invasion of Georgia. It's proxy in the middle east, Israel, the fourth largest military in the world was humiliated by Hizbollah and Iraq and Afghanistan are wars that can't be won.

As this unfolds, the leaders of organized Labor continue to render the Labor movement harmless as they cling to the coat tails of the Democratic Party in the desperate hope that this section of the ruling class will bring back the post war boom, that period from 1950 to 1973 that provided the material basis for the American Dream; "please bring back the good old days" the Labor leaders plead and throw all their eggs and their member's money in to the Obama basket.

But, as is for certain in the military, there is much anger beneath the surface of US society that cannot find organized expression. This blockage diverts this legitimate anger in to alcoholism and drug abuse, both legal and illegal; in to self absorption and addiction to mindless television shows as well as seeking solace in the supernatural world of religious fantasy.

Howard Zinn in an interview with Al Jazeera today says that the US empire is on the ways out. His hope is in the American people he says.In them
"becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people. [There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war. I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion."

I think in general Zinn is right, the dam will break at some point. While I have great respect for Zinn for his contribution as a historian, he is a liberal and like most liberals he doesn't see the working class as a force for change; he has no confidence in the working class and is therefore more afraid of the future. But he is not wrong to be concerned that's for sure and he is right about rebellion. Unfortunately, primarily due to the role played by the Labor leadership, some rebellions have been crushed and the building of an independent working class offensive has been delayed. Much unnecessary pain has been inflicted on the US working class due to this role.

This is the worst crisis in 60 years, particularly for the Anglo Saxon economies. As I've said before, we are living in interesting times.