The Repug plan...the BIG picture?

[LUHiWY]

http://www.uruknet.com/?p=m26393&hd=0&size=1&l=e

"While most commentators have in recent months focused on US and Israeli militarism in the Middle East and South Asia, US capitalism is preparing for a new offensive domestically and overseas. Three areas are targeted by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies:

1) a renewed effort to privatize social security, reduce social programs such as Medicare and Medicaid while increasing individual payments, further reduce taxes on corporations and the rich and state regulatory controls over corporations, especially the Sarbanes-Oxley Law, in order to ease corporate global financial transactions, at the risk of small investors;

2) a big push by US multinational corporations to finance their exploitation and takeovers of 'emerging countries’ (Third World) by capturing local savings;

3) a major effort to lower trade and investment barriers – such as local subsidies and tariffs – for US industrial, financial and other service corporations while retaining a privileged place for heavily subsidized US agro-exporters and protected US agro businesses in the domestic market.

The inter-relation of economic empire building – both in terms of control over overseas markets and enterprises – is closely linked to domestic policies. Tax cuts for the corporation and rich increase capital for export; privatized social security adds billions in profits for Wall Street investment banks; cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and increased fees and co-payments, provides greater funds to pay wealthy bondholders. The empire grows while the domestic social economy is impoverished."



"Economic and Military Modes of Empire Building

While world attention has focused largely on Washington’s military interventions and violent covert operations as the most visible signs of empire building, they have overlooked the far more successful domestic and overseas economic strategies designed to enhance the US economic empire. Substantial evidence exists that US Middle East policymakers did not take account of major multi-national corporate interests in launching the Afghan and Iraq Wars, and backing the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon. The predominant role of civilian militarists (predominantly Zionists and pro-Israel officials inside the government) and the multi-headed Jewish Lobby were far more active than oil, or military industrial manufacturers in designing, planning and propagandizing sequential wars against Arab and Muslim adversaries of Israel.

The adverse consequences of these US proxy wars, particularly the record oil price has over time pushed the US economy toward a recession. To compensate for the economically and politically costly losses resulting from US military expansion and the negative repercussions working their way through the economy, the Bush Administration has turned away from previous industry-based Treasury Secretaries to Wall Street’s premier representative Hank Paulson. His strategy is to work within the militarist parameters imposed by the neo-conservatives and vigorously pursue a cut and slash policy on all major social policies, including the privatization of Social Security.

Faced with and conforming to the policy of a huge and growing military budget and massive tax cuts for the rich, the only option for fueling US overseas economic expansion is by putting trillions of dollars of Social Security funds under Wall Street management, slashing government funded Medicare and Medicaid funds, undercutting corporate legislation facilitating imaginative accounting and overseas transfers, encouraging US overseas subsidiaries to exploit local savings and pushing neo-mercantilist bi-lateral trade agreements that allow US subsidized exporters and investors to take over client regime economies.

Will Paulson, Bush’s closest economic adviser, succeed in expanding the economic empire while the Pentagon and State Department wage war? There are several reasons to doubt his success. Bush’s previous effort to privatize Social Security failed. Although the vast majority of US citizens vehemently oppose privatization, Paulson will pursue a step-by-step process by which he may be able to build a 'bi-partisan’ coalition, especially as a fiscal crisis resulting from the recession may lower tax revenue and raise the decibels about doing 'something’ (cuts) in entitlement programs.

The route of bilateral trade agreements will continue but cannot expect to advance beyond overt client regimes, especially in Latin America because of mass pressure, the opposition of Venezuela and the non-reciprocal nature of US liberal trade reforms (the maintaining of US farm subsidies).

If the wars in the Middle East continue to erode political support for the Bush regime, Paulson’s capacity to implement regressive social policies will decline. It is hard to imagine even the US public supporting the privatization of Social Security, cuts in Medicaid, a growing casualty rate in Iraq and Afghanistan and global diplomatic isolation for backing the Israeli war machine.

One might argue that the economic empire builders will eventually displace the civilian militarists, the Israel-Firsters and re-assert a new ideological cocktail of domestic nationalism and overseas economic expansionism. This is highly unlikely under Paulson’s watch precisely because he is tied to Wall Street which is par excellence based on international movements of capital and would be deeply concerned with any variant of 'nationalism’ which might provoke overseas imitators."

[Parisle]

1. Global Economic Theme Is On Target

---- Small wonder that the administration wanted fellow PNAC'er Wolfowitz in charge of the World Bank, eh?