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Edited on Wed Jun-23-04 12:23 PM by IrateCitizen
First off, your discussion regarding US attempts to maintain petro-hegemony are interesting, but I think they're a bit incomplete. I fully appreciate your discussion of the Dollar v. Euro issue WRT petroleum, as it is a major issue -- not necessarily from strict economic terms, as much as from control of resources concerns. However, it needs to be noted the reasons for the US invasion of Iraq (an action which, IIRC, you strangely enough argued in favor in a past issue of your magazine, albeit for humanitarian reasons) were not really to take all of the world's oil for itself, as much as they were about maintaining control over the world's oil supply as a bullwark against the increasingly-independent EU and Japan, who still rely upon the Middle East for the overwhelming majority of their oil.
According to the French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd in his book After the Empire (a highly-recommended read!), the US is primarily concerned with trying to maintain a hegemony that no longer exists. It is also trying to accomplish this fool's errand through outdated military means, when the real power in the world is now wielded economically, and there will never again be a true world power. Instead, we are increasingly seeing the competition and cooperation between different regions -- i.e. the EU, the Pacific Rim led by Japan and an emerging China, and even the possible emergence of a South American bloc led by Brazil and Argentina. Todd describes this phenomenon in a relatively simple but hard-hitting way: "The rest of the world is discovering that it can get along with the United States at the same moment that the United States is realizing it cannot get along without the rest of the world." What Todd means by this is that the EU and Japan have become not only economically-independent, but also politically independent -- while the US's economy has been hollowed out and is primarily held together by excessive consumer spending financed by the hogging of the majority of global investment capital through the IMF.
The US is able to maintain a degree of hegemony in this arrangement, so long as Europe (led by the emerging Franco-German alliance at it heart) and Japan are willing to go along. But an increasingly arrogant and irrational United States is making this arrangement more and more tenuous.
As Todd writes, the wild card in all of this is Russia. Despite half-hearted attempts to facilitate the collapse of Russia following the fall of the USSR on the part of US policies, Russia is on the road to re-emergence. It has experienced significant economic growth for the past 3 years running after a decade of contraction. Most importantly, it possesses immense oil and gas reserves, along with a natural resource base rendering it practically self-sufficient -- which means that it can tell the IMF/World Bank/WTO to go straight to hell if it so desires. Russia is currently in the process of attempting to forge significant ties with Europe, which only makes sense because they share much more in cultural values than either do with the United States -- along with the fact that Russia isn't encumbered by the same hubris and dreams of world domination that seem to currently inflict American geopolitical thought. In this sense, Russia's relative weakness may turn out to be its greatest strength.
Should the EU and/or Japan turn toward a deeper and permanent alliance with Russia, that leaves the US out in the cold. We won't be able to control their oil spigot anymore, and will be left with a hornet's nest of largely our own making in the Middle East. There will no longer be the need to allow the US to dictate global financial and trade terms, resulting in a drying up of investment capital accompanied by a 20%-25% reduction in the US standard of living. This, of course, will in turn facilitate the collapse of our massive military-industrial complex, and reduce our standing on the world stage to that of just another industrialized nation.
Getting on to the greater subject at hand, "Greenleap", it will not be a politically-driven event. I think you're starting to see it, it fits and starts, taken up by segments of the population. Living simplicity campaigns are taking off. There is increasing interest in cohousing, along with the redesign of existing suburban enclaves, to both live in a more environmentally-responsible manner and find greater community fulfillment.
Current political institutions are too tied-up with the very interests opposed to any kind of sustainable development. And on what remains of the political left, conventional wisdom still holds in the mistaken belief that the key lies not in sustainability and egalitarianism, but in perpetual economic growth. Although this arrangement might have worked in the post-WWII boom, as described by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Affluent Society, as a means of combatting economic inequalities within society, it is clear now that it is a strategy of the past, with little applicability in today's world.
Personally, as a democratic socialist, I can fully appreciate the need for increased real democracy along with movement toward a sustainable economy. However, I also fully appreciate the need for markets and capital enterprise, and would probably be on the side of free-marketeers under a fully socialist system. However, as described through both theory and example in the book The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, William Greider shows that a reform of our economic system will not come from an already-compromised political system -- rather, it will come from movements around the edges that eventually catch on and move toward the mainstream. There is no set pattern for producing a sustainable economy, which is why the best we can hope for is a broadening committment to such a concept, with an accompanying transformation that is sure to happen in fits and starts (but will hopefully be made less painless by the committment to seeing it through).
Of course, the other option is simply to continue along until we reach crisis mode, and then thrash about madly trying to deal with the immediate problem. It's simply up to those of us who don't heed the dictates of conventional wisdom, who are willing to think and act outside the box, to ensure that the worst case scenario doesn't happen. The vast majority of Americans who are hypnotized by cheap trinkets and reality television aren't going to do it, which means that the political leaders certainly aren't either. It's up to us.
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