[PEN-L:9432] RE: Re: Re: Shades of Summers

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

I prefer to think of the Summers types, the neoliberal globalists, as the
neo-Eichmanns. They are the technicians and ideological
theoreticians/apologists of death of innocents while keeping their hands
"clean" from directly pulling the trigger. They have as much death on their
hands as any Pol Pot through "austerity programs", social systems
engineering campaigns in the First, Second and Third Worlds, elaborate
models that come down to--and rationalize-- wealth being sucked upward with
little if any "trickle down", justifications of imperial hegemony under the
banners of "free market capitalism" and "free trade" etc...

Just as imperial ideology/ideologists quickly adapt from protectionism to
"free trade" back to protectionism and back to free trade--depending upon
ability to protect and expand hegemony through nominal "free trade" versus
out-and-out protectionism (always there under the surface)--and just as
imperial ideology/ideologists can quickly switch from "puritan ethics" to
Libertarianism on social questions (in accordance with changing SSA
requirements and changing populace compositions of the mass social base
supporting imperialism), and from "isolationism" to "interventionism", so
imperial ideology/ideologists can form some opportunistic and ecclectic
syntheses to form new warmed-over versions of the same old rationales and
justifications for imperial conquest/hegemony/manipulation which is what
neoliberal globalism is all about behind its facades and calculus of
"rationality", "efficiency", "growth", "progress", "trickle-down" etc.

Behind all the rhetoric is the same old rigged game: like a race between
Bruce Jenner and a quadraplegic. Only this race is even more rigged than the
race between Bruce Jenner and the Quadraplegic. In the "free competition"
between BJ and the quadraplegic, presumably Bruce Jenner's advance does not
widen/deepen the distance between himself and the quadraplegic by actually
setting back the posiiton of the quadrapelgic, only the quadraplegic remains
nearly stationary while BJ advances. In the game of neoliberal globalism
however, the specific policies, programs and structures of "conditionality"
and nominal regimes of "free trade" produce the development of further
underdevelopment; imperialism not only feeds off of underdevelopment, it
requires and promotes the furtherance of it. It is like two runners in a
race where one is held to a certain position while the other is advanced
halfway around the track; then, the winner of race one is advanced even
further while the preordained loser is not only held back but pushed to a
starting position even more disadvantageous than the original hold-back
position in the first race--gross inequalities can only beget even more
gross inequalities under the nominal "free trade" and "free competition" of
neoliberal globalism.

The parlor theoreticians and dilettantes and out-and-out whores and pimps
for imperialism like Summers and his ilk can sit back and believe they are
no Pol Pots, that they have never actually pulled the trigger and therefore
they do not have any of the guilt of a Pol Pot, but their policies, as sure
as the Sun will rise tomorrow, do indeed produce and exacerbate famines in
Africa and elsewhere, misery among Indigenous Peoples, dislocated and
ground-up workers, widening inequalities and wealth and incomes that shape
distorted structures of aggregate supply/aggregate
demand/investment/employment/ resource allocations/political power and
access, grotesque wastes of resources in financial speculation and 30-second
trades, manipulation of foreign governments to create climates hospitable to
imperial power projection and hegemony etc etc.

It is interesting that more and more Talk Shows and TV programs have
self-avowed and very vocal Libertarians on them (John Stossel and Bill Maher
on ABC). The old "puritan" issues and perspectives are no longer sufficient
to capture and coalesce segments of the lumpenproletariat, working class and
middle class into a mass social base that wind up in voting single-issue
(abortion, gays, immigrants, America No. 1, jingoism, national chauvinism
etc) voting also on broader issues and parties that can never serve even
their self-defined interests. Now we get the "hip Libertarians" nominally
"progressive" on social issues like pro-choice, legalizing drugs, sexual
libertinism etc coupled with the old "personal responsibility", "free
markets/trade uber alles", "all exchanges must be mutually beneficial
otherwise they would not have occurred", "the answer to any problems or
dislocations of capitalism is simply more and freer capitalism", "government
is the enemy" (until your house floods then it is out the door and open hand
for your FEMA check), etc.

I put the neoliberal globalists, the libertarians and even the Kennedy-type
liberals in the same camp. They either deny there is a cancer outright or
they prescribe an aspirin for a brain tumor and then pat themselves on the
back for having taken the time and "humanity" to be concerned enough to
prescribe the aspirin. Then we get the POMOs as narcissistically in love
with their rhetoric as they are in love with themselves, and  like the
sociologists and neoclassicals who tell us what is obvious or commonplace in
language we can't understand, spend hours and pages on tracts that are
meaningless except for a few CV-builders and cult members--they pimp
"revolution" in language that serves to disorient and distract from real
revolution and real issues in which they apparently have no intent to
participate in any real way or in any way that would involve real risks and
loss of "Star" status among their little cults.


Jim Craven