Gotterdamerung 0
Tom Engelhardt writes in the Asia Times that the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt presage the end of American hegemony. After discussing American militarism (Iraq and so on), he moves on financial globalism, which he considers as destructive as random wars.
He sees two waves of American economic unilateralism masquerading as “globalism.”
An excerpt:
I’m talking about the globalists, sometimes called the neo-liberals, who were let loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post-Cold-War Bill Clinton years.
They, too, were dreamy about organizing the planet and about another kind of American power that was never going to end: economic power. (And, of course, they would be called back to power in Washington in the Obama years to run the US economy into the ground yet again.) They believed deeply that we were the economic superpower of the ages, and they were eager to create their own version of a Pax Americana. Intent on homogenizing the world by bringing American economic power to bear on it, their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund to discipline developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.
The irony was that, in the economic meltdown of 2008, they finally took down the global economy they had helped “unify”. And that occurred just as the second wave of unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global domination. In the process, for instance, Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, was economically neo-liberalized and – except for a small elite who made out like the bandits they were impoverished.
Talk about “creative destruction”! The two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet. They let loose demons of every sort, even as they ensured that the world’s first experience of a sole superpower would prove short indeed. Heap onto the rubble they left behind the global disaster of rising prices for the basics – food and fuel – and you have a situation so combustible that no one should have been surprised when a Tunisian match lit it aflame.
