Gerald Horne concludes his fine new book, “Blows Against Empire” with a chapter titled “U.S. Imperialism Unbound?” It is a chapter that should be must reading both for progressives and for what an old Communist once called “the smart rich,” those in the U.S. who realize that the policies of recent decades, however profitable they have been in the short run, are producing disasters which seriously threaten their wealth and long-term class interests.
Today there are great worries on Wall Street and in the board rooms of big capital and for good reasons. The far reaching financial crisis which began in August 2007, Horne contends, encourages the foreign creditors of the U.S. to turn their dollars into “investment funds” to in effect acquire U.S. assets. This in a truly remarkable role reversal leads to U.S. private firms being controlled by foreign governments (of which the Peoples Republic of China is a significant, and certainly for the “cowboy capitalists” in Dallas and Washington, very disturbing example).
Meanwhile, the world of unregulated global hedge funds, with trillions of assets, becomes increasingly a sort of economic al Qaeda (my turn of phrase) for U.S. imperialism, a Frankenstein monster of the anti-regulation frenzy led by right-wing U.S. governments over the last three decades. Today these funds engage in the sort of late 19th century 'robber baron' looting of businesses which led to the development of regulation of industrial and finance capital in the first place.
Global hedge funds are not the only byproducts of U.S. policy that are turning on their creator. The International Monetary Fund (created by the U.S. largely at the end of WWII and controlled completely U.S. finance as the world’s capitalist currency was pegged to the U.S. dollar until the early 1970s, when the acquisition of dollars by European and Middle Eastern interests made that impossible to continue) is now openly criticizing U.S. deficits, trade policy, and for that matter, the lack of universal health care in the U.S.
As few U.S. politicians understand, and as the insurance and pharmaceutical company health care complex goes to great lengths to keep them from understanding, the private insurance based health care system here makes it less likely for foreign firms to invest in the U.S. since they must pay private health insurance costs, something that they don’t have to do in the rest of the developed world.
While I have a disagreement with Horne on his points concerning the IMF (I would note that the IMF, in its growing criticism of the U.S. deficit has “suggested” significant Social Security and other social service cuts of the kind that it traditionally called for it poor countries with U.S. support) one cannot disagree with his major point – the tables are turning against U.S. based monopoly capitalism and imperialism, not only in regard to mass popular resistance both here and abroad but also by the increasing opposition of non U.S. finance capital.
Anti-Communists in attacking the Soviet Union and other socialist countries liked to point to the people leaving those countries to say smugly that the people were” voting with their feet.” Capitalists vote with their money and, as Horne shows, the enormous influx of foreign credit and capital, central to the continued functioning of the U.S. national economy, has been slowing in the last few years.
Horne is at his very best in explaining how the Bretton Woods system in effect created until the 1970s a complete and afterwards substantial “dollar hegemony” which enabled the U.S. to get the kinds of capital it needed largely on its own terms, regardless of its profligacy.
As a brief but I think interesting aside, I often tell my classes that the chief U.S. negotiator at Bretton Woods was Harry Dexter White, a leading New Dealer who used U.S. economic power to outmaneuver John Maynard Keynes, the chief British negotiator and to establish the U.S. controlled IMF-World Bank system. White wanted to create international economic institutions that would use U.S. power against colonialism and for greater economic equality and security for the peoples of the world. After WWII, White was attacked as a Soviet agent and died while under attack from HUAC and the right.
Although White’s hopes for the Bretton Woods system was the opposite of what it became, if capitalists had any sense of gratitude, they might build a statue to Harry White in Wall Street, because Bretton Woods did much more to advance U.S. corporate and the financial power of the capitalist class than all of the legions of professional and amateur red-baiters, whose policies helped create not only the post war cold war but the present economic crisis.
However, as Horne effectively shows, U.S. imperialists continue to live in the past (a past they in no way understand) and search for scapegoats, the Peoples Republic of China and to a much lesser extent the “new Russia,” along with Iranians and Venezuelans, a list of old and new “usual suspects, to explain away their present troubles.
Also, the Bush administration, increasingly isolated abroad, becomes more brutal, dictatorial and extreme at home and abroad as its position becomes more and more untenable. As Horne says so eloquently, “Uncle Sam has traveled around the world like a deranged pan handler, rattling a tin cup in one hand with an Uzi sub-machine gun in the other, demanding tribute. But increasingly, this crude robbery is becoming unsustainable.”
Gerald Horne has outlined for us a scenario for unprecedented disasters for the American people and the people of the world if we do not put an end to the policies which became watchwords in the Reagan era, deregulation, detaxation, and privatization, and continue in more extreme forms to guide U.S. government policy.
However much they may wave the stars and stripes, put it on their lapels, and smugly proclaim “support our troops,” the corporate leaders and reactionary politicians who continue to hail these policies are as much “patriots” as Batista was a Cuban patriot or Chiang Kai-shek a Chinese patriot. Those who denounce critics of U.S. imperialism as “unpatriotic” and” un-American” have in effect, as one post war German women said of the Hitler regime’s treatment of the German people and nation, treated the American people and nation as accomplices in a selfish and self-serving gang whose purpose was to control the wealth and resources of the world as if no one else mattered.
We are not in the position of the German people during WWII. We are not under an open fascist dictatorship fighting a losing war against much of the world. We can still save both ourselves and that which is worthwhile in our traditions and culture without experiencing the disasters that Gerald Horne shows are likely if the present policies continue. But we must end those policies as rapidly as we can, beginning of course with the presidential and congressional elections which will be upon us in five months.
