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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Radical Conclusions, Reformist Solutions
More and more mainstream commentators seem to be catching on to the fact that Republicans and Democrats share the same economic and foreign policy agendas but may favor slightly different strategies for reaching their goals.

Take Jeff Faux, for example. He’s an economist who has held positions in various agencies of the federal government. He’s no radical. He writes for traditional liberal magazines like the American Prospect and The Nation.

But in his new book, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—and What It Will Take to Win It Back, Faux comes to the radical conclusion—radical, at least, by Washington standards—that both Republicans and Democrats are to blame for the unsustainable and perilous state of American empire.

In the book, Faux writes that the American governing class had no intention of demobilizing after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After a half century of wars, hot and cold, members of the governing class had acquired a taste for the “great games” of military and financial geopolitics, he explains. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the American elite believed they had a chance at truly dominating the world.

“The prospect of having to turn their swords into ploughshares—redirecting their energies to unheroic domestics tasks of eradicating urban poverty or cleaning up the environment, under the tiresome scrutiny of congressional committees, governors, mayors, and the undisciplined media that dogged domestic programs—was singularly unexciting,” Faux writes.

Both Republicans and Democrats have shared the hunger for economic and military supremacy in the post-Cold War era, he reminds us. “We do know that the bulk of the Democratic Party leadership—including the majority of Democratic senators supported the war” in Iraq, he says. “The difference between the Clinton neoliberals and the Bush neoconservatives over America’s fundamental role in the world is quite small. The leadership of the two parties is in accord with the notion that the American governing class has the authority and obligation to police the world. They only differ on the question of tactics,” he adds.

As noted in the title, Faux’s book is primarily about the machinery of the global economy, which he says is the “equivalent of a one-party system, dominated by a virtual network this book calls the Party of Davos,” the town in Switzerland where the world’s political and economic elite have their annual “convention.”

Faux takes an in-depth look at the U.S. Senate’s passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement during President Clinton’s first term. He remembers how many old-style liberals and leftists were outraged that Clinton decided to renege on his 1992 campaign pledge by lobbying Congress for NAFTA’s passage.

The same thing is happening today as some naïve observers express bewilderment at the Democratic leadership’s refusal to heed the perceived call of the electorate in the 2006 midterm elections for a speedy withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

“So it was not surprising that when the president they’d elected announced his support for Bush’s NAFTA, many Democrats felt double-crossed, and mobilized against him,” Faux writes about Clinton’s decision to support NAFTA, even though it did not contain social and environmental protections that he had promised to obtain.

Given the record of both Democrats and Republicans on trade issues during the previous 50 years, no one should have been surprised by Clinton’s betrayal. And no one should be surprised if the Democratic leadership adopts an even more hawkish position on Iraq than many Republicans during the next two years. Indeed, it’s the same globalization agenda—propped up by the U.S. military machine—that the two political parties have always peddled.

Faux repeatedly calls for a more democratic operation of trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico. His prescription includes passage of a continental economic bill of rights and economic integration between the three nations that “provides for both growth and democracy.”

Any prescription that contains a mandate for growth is doomed to failure. Maybe not tomorrow. Or next year. But unbridled growth and the need for natural resources to maintain the obligatory rate of growth, and the search for new markets and potential acquisition targets to sustain a 10% or 20% or 25% return on investment all will contribute to the weakening and ultimate chaotic downfall of the neoliberal agenda.

Faux is able to break through convention and identify those groups of people responsible for preserving our ruinous economic and political systems. But once he identifies the problem and its root causes, he gets scared when confronted with the more radical next step—system dismantlement—that must be taken to give this world and its inhabitants a chance for long-term survival.

And, with that, we once again run into the age-old conflict between reform and revolution, patching things up versus completely knocking over what’s rotten to the core. It’s usually said that both tactics have managed to gain ground, to accomplish goals. But with each day that passes, more land is paved over, more life is exterminated—more is lost forever.

Faux’s prescription would likely give us some much-needed short-term relief. But his visions for a more peaceful and just world don’t take into account the ultimate need for us to roll back our voracious appetite for controlling and then destroying the land on which we live. That irrational desire, that dilemma must be addressed by the real radicals if we can ever expect a real solution.