From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 20 2003 - 18:45:29 EST
>I only heard him a couple of times on KPFA. He did not discuss the >material you mention -- just that the old English aristocractic influences >without the Puritanical caveats came with the cotton from the deep South >to Texas. I could not defend a book that I did not read. But your point here is that without those Puritanical cavaets the Southern aristocracy which now runs the country has been willing to grant itself tax cuts which will jeopardize the public education system on which the long term health of the capitalist system in fact depends. If the heirs of Puritanical capitalism had been in office, then the tax cuts would not have been pushed through--this seems to be your point. Yet Clinton and Rubin enacted reductions in the capital gains tax. Were Reagan and Stockman beholden to the mythical Anglo Southern aristocracy when they pushed their tax cuts through? If we think that the anti-war and anti-Bush movement will save (real, true Puritanical) capitalism from a cabal and is thus sure to win bourgeois support through patient argumentation and electoral politics, we will surely have deluded ourselves to where we stand in history today. Only working class insurgency on extra-electoral political terrain will now force the capitalist class to give even the appearance of a shift in policy and regime. I wish it were not so. The hardly hardly banal nationalism of the American working class gives me very little confidence that there will soon be even the appearance of such a shift. I know many are filled with hope after the Seattle anti globalization uprising, the student anti sweatshop agitation, the anti war movements and the public statements by all those big Hollywood stars. An American left which features Michael Lind and Todd Gitlin however is not intellectually serious, and the American left is obviously not organized except by loons who will soon rush to the defense of Kim Jong-il. So I think we are well on the way to decisive defeat especially if Bush and Wolfowitz are able to create the semblance of some political democratic and material improvement in Iraq. As Perry Anderson suggests, this will give Bush all the irrestibility which he needs to refashion the Middle East: "Of course, as many otherwise well-disposed commentators have hastened to point out, rebuilding Iraq might prove a taxing and hazardous business. But American resources are large, and Washington can hope for a Nicaraguan effect after a decade of mortality and despair under UN siege-counting on the end of sanctions and full resumption of oil exports, under a US occupation, to improve the living conditions of the majority of the Iraqi population so dramatically as to create the potential for a stable American protectorate, of the kind that already more or less exists in the Kurdish sector of the country. Unlike the Sandinista government, the Ba'ath regime is a pitiless dictatorship with few or no popular roots. The Bush administration could reckon that the chances of a Nicaraguan outcome, in which an exhausted population trades independence for material relief, are likely to be higher in Baghdad than they were in Managua. In turn, the demonstration effect of a role-model parliamentary regime, under benevolent international tutelage-perhaps another Loya Jirga of the ethnic mosaic in the country-would be counted on to convince Arab elites of the need to modernize their ways, and Arab masses of the invincibility of America. In the Muslim world at large, Washington has already pocketed the connivance of the Iranian clerics (conservative and reformist) for a repeat of Enduring Freedom in Mesopotamia. In these conditions, so the strategic calculus goes, bandwagoning of the kind that originally brought the PLO to heel at Oslo after the Gulf War would once again become irresistible, allowing a final settlement of the Palestinian question along lines acceptable to Sharon." rb >On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 02:31:01PM -0800, Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > > >I don't know if the ruling class has split; I just noted the potential for >> >a split. I hope that it comes to pass. >> >-- >> >> But Michael I don't see why Lind or anyone else accepts at face value >> Bush's self-representation as a good ole, Southern boy who represents >> the (very) old economy and truly likes pork rinds. This is the image >> which Bush and Karl Rove have attempted to project to maintain his >> electoral base in the South and the Far West. To think that Bush is >> running Dell and Boeing into the ground for cattle ranches and Texas >> oil patches is farcical. >> Michael Lind is now only now making a political theory out of Bush's >> cynical image making and thus giving credence to one of Bush's key >> electoral weapons. Why the alarm bells do not go off every time Lind >> writes or says something is beyond me. He has already engaged in >> immigrant bashing and a pernicious nativism, Listian neo mercantilism >> and a virulent and anti-third world economic nationalism, and war >> mongering (in the case of Vietnam). >> So I don't see why you and the Nation magazine take this demagogue >>seriously. >> Rakesh >> >> >> >> >Michael Perelman >> >Economics Department >> >California State University >> >Chico, CA 95929 >> > >> >Tel. 530-898-5321 >> >E-Mail michael@ecst.csuchico.edu >> > >-- >Michael Perelman >Economics Department >California State University >Chico, CA 95929 > >Tel. 530-898-5321 >E-Mail michael@ecst.csuchico.edu
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