The rogue system

May 07, 2001

When George W Bush rode into the international scene, comparisons were promptly made with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Both were reputed to have the same cerebral content, the same attention span and behind both loomed a patriarch as the real string-puller. But there is a critical difference.

Sharif was the unintended consequence of political engineering by a visionless military dictator, and nearly ruined the country in his insecurity-driven quest for unbridled power. Bush is a prime product of the American politico-corporate combine and, like Ronald Reagan, could become an unmitigated success - the lack of cerebral and moral content being invaluable assets.

For an insight into the creative forces behind George W Bush, please consider Professor Noam Chomsky's analysis of what the Gore-Bush election had revealed about American "democracy:"

- Nearly half the electorate did not vote, and voting co-related with income - which is a direct result of the absence of a socialist or labourite alternative in the electoral market.

- The genius of the system is that, aided by the powerful media, it displaces issues (trade, budget, public-spending) that concern the voters (and on which they diverge from the big business which largely finances the election campaigns and runs the government) with trivialities which do not.

- The system compels the people to vote against their interests. In 1984, Reagan won a "landslide victory" with under 30% voter turnout even though "voters opposed his legislative programme by three to two."

- Such outcome results from a belief by half the population that the government is run by "a few big interests looking out for themselves." After Reagan's "neo-liberal reform", this belief is shared by 80% Americans. Harvard University's Vanishing Voter Project found that "Americans' feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high," with 53% believing that people have little or no influence on what the government does.

- During the Gore-Bush contest, 60% of the regular voters felt that politics in America was "generally very disgusting" and 75% believed that the whole process was controlled by "rich contributors, party leaders and the public relations industry which crafted artificial candidates who cannot be believed even when what they say is intelligible."

- The increasing sense of voter powerlessness has transferred decision-making to unaccountable private power systems and has created a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders who exercise veto power over government decisions.

- The biggest and newest tool in the hands of these controllers of democracy is capital mobility facilitated by increasing financial liberalisation. They can now prevent labour organisation by threatening to transfer jobs across the world.

- The one great achievement of international capitalist democracy is growing worker insecurity by keeping wages, benefits and inflation low while increasing profits. This increases the concentration of wealth and proliferation of poverty worldwide. Hence the economic, health and social indicators of the majority have declined to the level of 40 years ago, forcing 32 million Americans below the poverty line.

- Thus, "much of the population becomes superfluous for profit and power, insecure and politically marginalised ... their aspirations reduced to (choosing) among commodities while others run the world."

- James Madison, one of the framers of the US constitution, believed the system was designed "to protect the (opulent) minority ... against the majority." Therefore, political power must remain in the hands of "the wealth of the nation", men who can be trusted to "secure the permanent interests of the country" - ie the rights of the propertied - and to defend these against the "levelling spirit" of those who "labour under all hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings."

- Walter Lippmann dubbed the general public as "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" who should be mere "spectators of action", apart from exercising a periodic choice among "responsible men" ie a "polyarchy" which, having served "authentic power," would thereafter function in "technocratic insulation", undisturbed by the "outsiders".

Thus, Professor Chomsky concluded, the Bush victory did not "reveal a flaw of American democracy, but rather its triumph". And sure enough, barely 100 days in office, Bush has begun delivering - kicking off by reneging on his campaign commitment to cut back on the polluting emissions by the American power industry.

Then came the shocking scuttling of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) - an arduous and decade-long negotiating process which had bound the industrialised world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990-levels. With 4% of the world's population, the Americans can now continue to churn out 24% (and more) of these gases. The automobile and oil lobbies are happy, the environment and the island-nations and low-lying coastal regions that will drown be damned.

President Bush is rampaging ahead to conjure a new cold war out of nowhere. Considered in the backdrop of subsequent events, the collision between the Chinese fighter jet and US EP-3 spy plane does not seem an accident. Nonetheless, after saying a double sorry - which, of course, was not an apology! - the US tone changed abruptly as its captive crew took off from China.

The sale of hi-tech weapons to Taiwan was announced, eroding the 1982 Sino-US agreement restricting such supplies to Taiwan, followed by restrictions on Sino-US military ties. Simultaneously, in a departure from the first cold war compelled by the China trade and investment lobby in the US, the commitment to "one China policy" was reiterated.

As if on cue, the young Karmappa Lama, having mysteriously escaped from China and gone to ground in India, suddenly surfaced before the world media to endorse the Dalai Lama's struggle for Tibetan "identity and autonomy." Australia and Japan also added pinpricks by endorsing the Taiwan weapons sale and issuing a visa to former Taiwanese President against Chinese protests. Throw in South Korea, and the ring around China is complete.

To cap these palpable attempts to goad China into a rash reaction, President Bush unfurled the National Missile Defence programme to shield the US and allies from maverick missiles. Even as experts were tearing their hair out that not even a "rogue state" (now dignified as "states of concern") can be suicidal enough to fire a missile at the US, India became the only country to mouth unquestioned support. It is slated, as also Japan and South Korea, to receive a US emissary for consultation on the NMD. Pointedly excluded are China, North Korea and, of course, Pakistan.

Forgotten in the rush of events is the fact that the Clinton administration had engaged the "arch villain", North Korea, into a normalisation dialogue with South Korea. More importantly, it had declared a freeze until 2003 on its much-maligned ballistic missile testing and even halted its "nuclear programme" on the US promise of (South Korea-funded) nuclear power plants and oil supplies.

Yet, without so much as an explanation, howsoever implausible, all this good work has been trashed to justify the NMD. Thus, even as North Korea (which, by western media accounts, is desperate for help even to feed its people) reaffirmed its ballistic-missiles moratorium before a visiting European Union delegation, it again became a serious enough threat for the US to spend 60 billion dollars on developing a missile shield which may never work. And which cannot be safer than the balance of terror formalised by the US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty of 1972 (and which will certainly be no defence against the more plausible threat of a suitcase nuclear-device).

Clearly, having pushed the Soviet Union into oblivion through a suicidal arms-race, the US military-industrial complex does not find the "Islamic fundamentalist threat" it had invented after the cold war a sufficient justification for more defence spending and mega-profits.

It needs China (current defence budget 14.5 billion dollars out of a GDP of 4.8 trillion dollars, against the United States' whopping 270 billion out of GDP of 9.3 trillion) to divert much more from its booming economy into a new arms race while, simultaneously, remaining open to US investment and supplying it with cheap consumer goods. These, then, are the paradoxical parameters of the new cold war.

Since, unlike Russia, China did not fall into the market- and debt-trap, it has to be bled by other means. But, unlike the boorish Russians, the Chinese are backed by 5000 years of wisdom. Besides, as its unceremonious ouster from the UN's Human Rights Commission suggests, Uncle Sam's chickens are coming home to roost. The rising pro-environment and anti-capitalist militancy - "eco-terrorism" and "new anarchy" - will be giving the US and its corporate controllers other headaches in the years ahead. President Bush's contrived new cold war may, therefore, remain no more than shadowboxing.

The author is a freelance columnist
                                                                                           Back