U.S. expansion based on destruction of industry
From a talk by Bill Doares at the Dec. 2-3 Workers
World Party conference.
On New Year's Eve 1999, CNN financial analyst Louis
Rukeyser made a rosy economic forecast for the 21st century.
He said, "The longest economic expansion in history, which we
hope will last forever, lays to rest once and for all the
myth that our economy can prosper only in time of war."
In truth, there has never been a peaceful capitalist
economic expansion--not in the olden days of competitive
capitalism and surely not under monopoly capitalism. The
"peaceful" post-Soviet decade began with the high-tech
devastation of Iraq in a war that continues to this day. It
ended with the largest bombing campaign in Europe since 1945,
the NATO occupation of Kosovo and the coup against
Yugoslavia.
The Pentagon has revived its Star Wars program and NATO is
marching east in the footsteps of Hitler's Werhrmacht. The
former Soviet republic of Belarus is the new target of CIA
"covert ops."
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are already in
NATO. The right-wing regimes in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and
Azerbaijan are in the NATO-linked "Partnership for Peace."
This amounts to a U.S.-controlled military cordon between
Russia, with its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, and
Wall Street's West European capitalist rivals. It threatens a
monstrous new war.
All this military spending means big bucks for the war
industry, but that's not the real secret of the late
capitalist expansion. World War II was a blessing for Wall
Street not only because of the huge war contracts that
birthed the military-industrial complex. Even more important
was the global destruction of industry that left U.S.
corporations dominating the world market and made the U.S.
dollar supreme.
In the last 10 years, the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank have destroyed more industry in Eastern Europe and
North Asia than the Nazis did in World War II. From the
Baltic Sea to the Balkans to the Bering Straits, mills, mines
and factories are silent, people are hungry and children are
dying.
The Soviet Union was once the world's top producer of oil
and steel, ships and airplanes, books and shoes. It put the
first man and woman in space, built the Aswan Dam in Egypt
and constructed steel plants in Vietnam, India and Ethiopia.
Now workers in once-thriving Soviet industrial towns try to
live on potatoes they grow in their backyards.
Working-class life expectancy has fallen into the fifties
as epidemics ravage the land. In Bulgaria workers live on 48
cents a day. In Ukraine, industrial production has dropped 70
percent, the average old-age pension is $13 a month and the
population is falling by 1 million a year.
This economic genocide has devastated not only the former
socialist countries but those in Africa and Asia that relied
on them for trade. It even economically destabilized Western
Europe and Japan.
The destruction of industry in a big part of the world has
artificially inflated the value of U.S. corporate assets.
That--not the Internet or interest-rate juggling--constitutes
the "magic" behind the strong dollar, soaring stock prices
and fat profits of the last eight years. Last year, according
to the UN, the U.S. economy soaked up 85 percent of all
international investment.
Ultimately this state of affairs can only be maintained by
force of arms.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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