Franz J.T. Lee, August, 2009
Is Barack Obama steering a healthy ship out of turbulent titanic global waters?
Is the capitalist world economic crisis over? Are we coming to grips with the financial scandal and banking fiasco?
Have we saved world capitalism and can we now peacefully get down to big business, to big wars again?
Although lately. very little was reported from Wall Street, are its 'Crash, Crack and Slump' really just nightmares of the remote past?
Is US President Barack Obama steering a healthy ship of State out of the turbulent titanic waters of the Bermuda Triangle?
When will the 'Obamania' stop ... when will we see imperialism as a global reality?
At least, about all this, it seems that our international mass media is trying very hard to inform us about our current development, our progress towards a good neoliberal capitalism, towards the best of all possible worlds.
Well, nothing else is more further away from the global truth than such ideological fabrications and deliberate manipulatory machinations.
Let us just pay a visit to some hot spots in the global burning crucible. Let us start on Wall Street!
Dow Jones just registered a 2% crash, its greatest loss over the last six weeks, ending up with 9,135.26 points. Most stock markets are reporting similar losses, even Shanghai reported a loss of 5.8%; Ford stocks fell 5.87%; Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae dropped 9.22 and 9.71%, respectively. *1)
Hence, in the same tempo as the next G20 summit meeting to be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is approaching, the threatening dialectical economic contradictions within the metropolitan countries are deepening. Slowly but surely, inexorably the noisy grinding economic mills of the current super depression are spelling planetary doom for humanity, not only for the super powers, but even more so for millions of international impoverished workers.
A desperate corporate imperialism is casting them progressively into the epicenter of the capitalist Moloch, into the pangs and fangs of human global self-destruction, of the geometric world explosion of pauperization, bondage and misery (Marx).
Consequently, daily, millions and millions of wage slaves of all categories are being caught up by the voracious tentacles of unemployment, bail-outs, budget cuts, cutbacks, wage cuts, down-sizing and layoffs.
This viral, pandemic, capitalist piggery is infecting the while globe.
Not
so long ago, within a relatively very short period of time, within
less than two decades ... 1929-1945 ... capitalism, severely
threatened, showed its true fascist, racist grimace. Fascism
ended up with the annihilation of large sectors of capital and
labor, with the destruction of cities, human resources and
infrastructures, of Marxists, communists, gypsies, Jews and
'blacks,' especially of millions of physical labor forces in
Europe, America, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
The
current global war economies, the military industrial complexes, the
dollarization of the world, the rise and fall of the super power, the
USA, began with nuclear Thanatos, with the launching of the
infamous Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs
which were thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, for mankind
the only real Via Crucis of our epoch has already commenced
with capitalist lies, imperialist myths and corporate hoaxes,
like the typical cases of "Pearl Harbor", the fake
"AMDs" in Iraq or the ideological mysticism around
"9/11."
It continued with electoral fraud and
economic corruption, concentration camps, Bantustans,
apartheid, Gaza, torture chambers, body, mind and thought
control, patriot acts, full spectrum dominance, Moscow trials,
genocide, gulags, nuclear war, militarization of the planet and of
space.
Now, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall of Woe, what
will our corporate future bring us?
Arms of Mass
Destruction, again fox-hunting, to shoot down rabbits or
Bushmen, to quarter black slaves?
Again Western,
Christian Culture?
Perhaps, gadgets
electro-magnetically to roast demonstrators, women,
philosophers and scientists on the stake; who knows, in a huge black
pot to make a delicious transgenic, cloned missionary soup?
Or,
will we continue to hunt phantoms, Bin Laden, Mars creatures, or ...
Yes ... in capitalism everything is possible, also in
the land of trillions of golden opportunities, of
greenbacks!
Could bail-outs, national or continental
chauvinism, protectionist trade policies, 'national socialism'
or even economic nationalism still salvage a crumbling dollar,
a rumbling savage economy ... the United States of America and
many other countries in severe recession?
What is
happening de facto?
What is the crux, the golden calf,
of the matter?
Simply: super power rivalry, economic
conflicts, intra-class struggle between the USA and Europe for
a future hegemonic place under the scorching, scourging sun.
According to Stefan Steinberg today, more than before, "the
German and French governments, in particular, have been waging
a concerted campaign against Anglo-American domination of the
world’s financial markets." *2)
On the verge
of the raging international class struggle, even "leftist"
parties, organizations and trade unions participate in this European
depressive brawl, in the ruling class vendetta: "The most
pernicious role in this outburst of protectionism and
nationalism is being played by the Social Democratic and
nominally Communist organizations in Europe, in alliance with
the trade unions. These parties and unions, in turn, have the
backing of a host of petty-bourgeois 'left' organizations."
*3)
Strange enough, but very logical, global
imperialism is retreating towards the fascist forties and
fifties of the previous century, towards "trade war,
colonial war and 'beggar-thy-neighbor' economic nationalism ...
which many thought were peculiar to the first half of the twentieth
century -- is the surest sign of the crisis and decay of the
capitalist system." *4)
In which way the
above global contradictions concern Venezuela?
Why is
the Obama administration throwing coals ... sorry, oil, gas and
water ... on the burning Uribe-Chavez conflict?
Why the
United States "indirect approach strategy" against
Venezuela?
Why the provocation, the planned
construction of seven US military bases in Colombia, in front
of the very nose of President Chavez?
According to a
recent article written by Vadim Trukhachev "PRAVDA: USA to
topple Venezuela's Chavez through 'indirect approach strategy,
"experts hold an opinion that the USA tries to discredit Chavez
and conducts an information war against him in order to topple
the stubborn Venezuelan President. It goes without saying that
the USA is not going to send troops to Venezuela ... the USA
acts indirectly through its ally ... military experts call it
the indirect approach strategy." 5)
Let us move
away from the US imperialist panorama to the European colonial
"backyard" to see how corporate "neoliberal savagery"
is devouring everything which can be transformed into profits,
hegemony and power.
The East European countries,
especially those situated in the Baltic region, are suffering
from a severe recession; they even have to beg for aid from the
itself already bankrupt International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Economically this current eastern neocolonial backyard of the
European Union (EU), especially of Germany, is in total
jeopardy. Ironically, to exemplify the absurd reigning fiasco,
some of the traditional regional export markets, like Belarus
and Ukraine, are themselves in a precarious situation; the
global downturn is forcing them also to seek solace in the
'benevolent' arms of the corporate 'fairy queen,' of the
IMF.
According to an article written by Jordan Shilton,
in Eastern Europe Lithuania is now leading the economic slump,
it is surpassing Latvia, which has recorded an economic
retraction of 18 percent in the first quarter of 2009: "On
July 28, Lithuania released economic figures for the second
quarter of 2009, revealing a year-on-year contraction of 22.4
percent of GDP. The data suggests that of the 27 EU members,
Lithuania will face the worst economic contraction this year."
*6)
Last year when Latvia's second largest bank, Parex
Banka, crashed and was bailed out within the context of the
general global economic turmoil, it received IMF aid with its
well-known exploitative conditions, already since decades
applied to the "Third World". Also, like in the case of
Iceland, all this is tantamount to a collapse of the Baltic
economies.
In the same velocity as layoffs and
foreclosures are mounting in the USA and elsewhere, curtailing
workers' rights, all over the Baltic region, as mentioned
before, the stereotypical 'remedies' are being administered:
budget cuts, cutbacks, wage cuts, unemployment, austerity, misery
and oppression. In Riga, Tallinn and Vilna (Vilnius), all these
resulted in economic contraction, followed by mass street
protests and government suppression.
What is the
bottom line?
Soon the whole globe will be heated up
with dozens of wild bush fires. Gideon Rachman, writing in the
Financial Times explains: "Despite the region’s
small size, the intensifying crisis in the Baltics cannot be
treated as a freakish local squall of little concern to outsiders.
Bank failures or plunging currencies in the three Baltic
nations -- Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- could threaten the
fragile prospect of recovery in the rest of Europe. These
countries also sit on one of the world’s most sensitive
political fault-lines. They are the European Union’s frontier
states, bordering Russia." 7)
What he did not
mention were the huge natural resources in the Caucasus and
Baku regions, the expansionist imperialist European drive
towards the Balkans, and thus the possible threat of a future Eurasia
for United States hegemony, for a future Corporate World State,
as demanded by the Club of Rome.
Similarly, the
Obama administration is preparing the second conquest of the
Americas, Amazonia, the Antarctic and Artic and the Caribbean, their
oil, gas, biodiversity, water, oxygen, strategic minerals and
metals.
To halt all this internationally, among others,
Fidel, Che, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg told us 'What it
to be Done" ... but they warned us, without true and real
anti-capitalism, without philosophic theory no emancipatory
praxis.
****
1)
www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?id_nota=452190
2)
www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a15.shtml
3)
Ibid.4) Ibid.
5) www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=82492
6)
www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/balt-a11.s
7) ibid.