Re: Re: Chossudovsky on Iraq bombing..

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

Not long ago on the list, there seemed to be an
agreement that a war could take the US out of economic
crisis. That is not far fetched, Mandel made a point
of it, the Marxist theory of war could be woven around
it, insofar as aggression remains the fifth facet of
imperialism, and even Paul Samuelson, in his
introduction to economics, hints at certain crisis in
the cycle which were overcome by war. Now comes Michel
Chossudovsky to pinpoint a specific incidence, the
bombing of Iraq, in which a calculus of happiness
between stock market performance and strategic
imperialist objectives results in optimum gains for
uncle Sam; That the US has to bomb Iraq is not an
issue: it simply has to or it would not be itself.
That it chose a specific moment of stock market
difficulty to do so seems to be the issue, since this
could be far fetched or, in other words, one would
attach a low probability to that. In the Monica
bombing instance, a single bourgeois, namely Clinton,
needed a fig leaf, in the case of the stock market, it
may be the bourgeoisie, which is in need of fig
leaves. As the tide recedes this time around, many,
i.e. more than usual,  are swimming naked. the bears
can burst together. So my question is Michel's
interpretation very much a "police interpretation of
history," one that Chomsky often makes as a result of
the US defeat in Vietnam, undercover activity
increased, or is the stock market affair really bigger
than the Monica affair such that a convenient timing
of aggressive imperialism to business difficulty
mirrors the extent of the crisis and the way economics
and politics will work closely together in this
unipolar era.

Ps. In some recent figure about stock ownership, the
rich owned something like 96% of all stocks. Of course
that depends on what threshold was used for the rich.

--- Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ken wrote:
> >I am not sure about this [Chossudovsky on Iraq
> bombing]. Do other people
> >find this a bit far-fetched? Certainly stocks
> associated with the
> >military-industrial complex are likely to prosper
> but I would think that
> >the touting of the NMD system has as much or more
> to do with this as the
> >specific instance of bombing Iraq.
>
> I find it very far-fetched. I'm sure that Bushbaby
> and, more importantly,
> his handlers want to help the stock market as much
> as possible (as with NMD
> and the tax-cut plan), but they are unlikely to try
> to fine-tune "the
> market." That's because no-one can predict the stock
> market except those
> with a lot of inside info (and I doubt that _anyone_
> has inside info about
> large chunks of the market or the market as a
> whole). No-one could predict
> that the stock market would rise due to the bombing
> of Iraq.  Further, I'm
> sure they're more interested in helping the rich as
> a whole -- and their
> friends and political allies -- than the stock
> market _per se_.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &
> http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>


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