Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 20:21:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Thomas Seay <entheogens-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: Fwd: George Monbiot and David Harvey


 Too much of a good thing
> 
> Underlying the US drive to war is a thirst to open
> up new opportunities for
> surplus capital
> 
> George Monbiot
> Tuesday February 18, 2003
> The Guardian
> 
> We are a biological weapon. On Saturday the anti-war
> movement released some
> 70,000 tonnes of organic material on to the streets
> of London, and similar
> quantities in locations all over the world. This
> weapon of mass disruption was
> intended as a major threat to the security of
> western governments.
> 
> Our marches were unprecedented, but they have, so
> far, been unsuccessful. The
> immune systems of the US and British governments
> have proved to be rather more
> robust than we had hoped. Their intransigence leaves
> the world with a series
> of unanswered questions.
> 
> Why, when the most urgent threat arising from
> illegal weapons of mass
> destruction is the nuclear confrontation between
> India and Pakistan, is the US
> government ignoring it and concentrating on Iraq?
> Why, if it believes human
> rights are so important, is it funding the
> oppression of the Algerians, the
> Uzbeks, the Palestinians, the Turkish Kurds and the
> Colombians? Why has the
> bombing of Iraq, rather than feeding the hungry,
> providing clean water or
> preventing disease, become the world's most urgent
> humanitarian concern? Why
> has it become so much more pressing than any other
> that it should command a
> budget four times the size of America's entire
> annual spending on overseas
> aid?
> 
> In a series of packed lectures in Oxford, Professor
> David Harvey, one of the
> world's most distinguished geographers, has provided
> what may be the first
> comprehensive explanation of the US government's
> determination to go to war.
> His analysis suggests that it has little to do with
> Iraq, less to do with
> weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with
> helping the oppressed.
> 
> The underlying problem the US confronts is the one
> which periodically afflicts
> all successful economies: the over-accumulation of
> capital. Excessive
> production of any good - be it cars or shoes or
> bananas - means that unless
> new markets can be found, the price of that product
> falls and profits
> collapse. Just as it was in the early 1930s, the US
> is suffering from
> surpluses of commodities, manufactured products,
> manufacturing capacity and
> money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a
> surplus of labour, yet the
> two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably
> matched. This problem has been
> developing in the US since 1973. It has now tried
> every available means of
> solving it and, by doing so, maintaining its global
> dominance. The only
> remaining, politically viable option is war.
> 
> In the 1930s, the US government addressed the
> problems of excess capital and
> labour through the New Deal. Its vast investments in
> infrastructure, education
> and social spending mopped up surplus money, created
> new markets for
> manufacturing and brought hundreds of thousands back
> into work. In 1941, it
> used military spending to the same effect.
> 
> After the war, its massive spending in Europe and
> Japan permitted America to
> offload surplus cash, while building new markets.
> During the same period, it
> spent lavishly on infrastructure at home and on the
> development of the
> economies of the southern and south-eastern states.
> This strategy worked well
> until the early 1970s. Then three inexorable
> processes began to mature. As the
> German and Japanese economies developed, the US was
> no longer able to dominate
> production. As they grew, these new economies also
> stopped absorbing surplus
> capital and started to export it. At the same time,
> the investments of
> previous decades began to pay off, producing new
> surpluses. The crisis of 1973
> began with a worldwide collapse of property markets,
> which were, in effect,
> regurgitating the excess money they could no longer
> digest.
> 
> The US urgently required a new approach, and it
> deployed two blunt solutions.
> The first was to switch from the domination of
> global production to the
> domination of global finance. The US Treasury,
> working with the International
> Monetary Fund, began to engineer new opportunities
> in developing countries for
>  America's commercial banks.
> 
> The IMF started to insist that countries receiving
> its help should liberalise
> their capital markets. This permitted the
> speculators on Wall Street to enter
> and, in many cases, raid their economies. The
> financial crises the speculators
> caused forced the devaluation of those countries'
> assets. This had two
> beneficial impacts for the US economy. Through the
> collapse of banks and
> manufacturers in Latin America and East Asia,
> surplus capital was destroyed.
> The bankrupted companies in those countries could
> then be bought by US
> corporations at rock-bottom prices, creating new
> space into which American
> capital could expand.
> 
> The second solution was what Harvey calls
> "accumulation through
> dispossession", which is really a polite term for
> daylight robbery. Land was
> snatched from peasant farmers, public assets were
> taken from citizens through
> privatisation, intellectual property was seized from
> everyone through the
> patenting of information, human genes, and animal
> and plant varieties. These
> are the processes which, alongside the depredations
> of the IMF and the
> commercial banks, brought the global justice
> movement into being. In all
> cases, new territories were created into which
> capital could expand and in
> which its surpluses could be absorbed.
> 
> Both these solutions are now failing. As the east
> Asian countries whose
> economies were destroyed by the IMF five years ago
> have recovered, they have
> begun, once more, to generate vast capital surpluses
> of their own. America's
> switch from production to finance as a means of
> global domination, and the
> government's resulting economic mismanagement, has
> made it more susceptible to
> disruption and economic collapse. Corporations are
> now encountering massive
> public resistance as they seek to expand their
> opportunities through
> dispossession. The only peaceful solution is a new
> New Deal, but that option
> is blocked by the political class in the US: the
> only new spending it will
> permit is military spending. So all that remains is
> war and imperial control.
> 
> 
> Attacking Iraq offers the US three additional means
> of offloading capital
> while maintaining its global dominance. The first is
> the creation of new
> geographical space for economic expansion. The
> second (though this is not a
> point Harvey makes) is military spending (a process
> some people call "military
> Keynesianism"). The third is the ability to control
> the economies of other
> nations by controlling the supply of oil. This, as
> global oil reserves
> diminish, will become an ever more powerful lever.
> Happily, just as
> legitimation is required, scores of former democrats
> in both the US and
> Britain have suddenly decided that empire isn't such
> a dirty word after all,
> and that the barbarian hordes of other nations
> really could do with some
> civilisation at the hands of a benign superpower.
> 
> Strategic thinkers in the US have been planning this
> next stage of expansion
> for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for
> defence, was writing about
> the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s. The
> impending war will not be fought
> over terrorism, anthrax, VX gas, Saddam Hussein,
> democracy or the treatment of
> the Iraqi people. It is, like almost all such
> enterprises, about the control
> of territory, resources and other nations'
> economies. Those who are planning
> it have recognised that their future dominance can
> be sustained by means of a
> simple economic formula: blood is a renewable
> resource; oil is not.
> 
> www.monbiot.com
> 
> 
> 


====<<Be like me!  The Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life,
    eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena.>>
    -Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

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