(Re)locating the Capitalist Empire

I’ve been reading two books in tandem the last couple days.

One is After the Empire: the Breakdown of the American Order by French historian Emmanuel Todd (English translation 2003, French original 2002)

(see the publisher’s book info, and Thom Hartmann’s book review at Buzzflash).

the other is Senator Robert Byrd’s Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (2004)

(see the Baltimore Sun’s review from last summer,
and Amy Goodman’s interview with Senator Byrd about the book for “Democracy Now”)

I’m about halfway through each of them, and they are providing plenty of food for thought. Taken together, they have the power to reshape anybody’s sense of both what American has already become over the last thirty years, and over the last five years, as well as where we may be heading in the near and longer term future.

Both Todd and Byrd, both the French intellectual historian and our own career statesman and historian, paint pictures of an American nation as a runaway freight train careening towards tyranny, a ship of state with a crew of empire-drunk madmen at the helm. Both see the 200-year old American experiment in democracy as currently and quickly coming apart at the seams, or more aptly, being pulled apart by a radicalized minority of power-grabbers who are succeeding in their assaults on power beyond perhaps even their own wildest feverish fantasies.

Contrary to expectations perhaps, Todd, the French intellectual no less, is more politic and measured in his critique of the Bush Administration itself. Eager not to come off as just another stereotypical anti-American Bush-basher, he concedes the neocons the benefit of the doubt, accepting their motives and reasoning as more or less rational and sensible, if objectionable, and choosing to focus his analysis instead on the emergent and emerging system of political-economic relations among the world’s nations of which the U.S. is the self-professed leader.

Senator Byrd of West Virginia, on the other hand, whose forty-five years in Washington politics has given him an insider perspective that is altogether different from Todd’s outsider analysis, provides a far harsher critique of the habits of reckless abuse of power that have settled over the White House like a thick dark fog since the earliest days of Bush’s first term.

Anybody wanting to track the GWBush overthrow of American democracy simply must read Senator Byrd’s book. Although it’s publication during the summer 2004 was clearly planned to coincide with the presidential election season, the book is far more than a polemical political tract. Byrd has written a timely political history, first-hand and personal, that reflects on and exposes from the very corridors of federal power the consistent and calculated ascendency of an executive branch unfettered by Constitutionally crafted restraints on the presidency.

Byrd’s picture of the Bushies’ M.O. confirms in countless details what Bush’s critics and opponents have always argued. Here we see a president who was unfit for office even before he ran, “a child of wealth and privilege and heir to an American political dynasty [who] did not pay his dues.”

We are reminded of how tax-slashing Bush budget proposals were railroaded through Congress without committee deliberations and scarcely a chance for lawmakers to read them.

A White House devoted to secrecy and back-room dealing at all costs is evoked in telling anecdotes from Byrd’s own infuriating personal dealings with the Bush administration.

An inept and inaccessible President who has staffers send curt, dismissive letters of rejection to senators of both parties who request meetings or solicit testimony on the gravest matters of state.

A White House that time and again has blocked and vetoed billions of dollars in funding, not for social programs—these are off the table entirely—but for beefing up national security, despite the White House rhetoric of fighting terrorism and strengthening our country’s egregious liabilities and weak spots.

He offers his trenchant recollections on Dick Cheney’s steonewalling with the GAO over his “Energy Taskforce;” the clandestine crafting and passing of the civil liberties killing Patriot Act, and the Constitution-eviscerating Department of Homeland Security.

Exasperated with it all, Byrd exclaims “Hubris, thy name is Bush.”

Byrd’s experience prompts him to dub this a “rogue White House,” driven by “Rumsfeldian arrogance” and dominated by “superhawks,” it “virtually sneers at the legislative branch.”

I will have more comments to make both on Byrd’s Losing America and Todd’s After the Empire in coming days and posts, but here I would like to articulate some insights that have been prompted by my reading of these two books (and others), and crystallized through a careful contemplation this morning of my world atlas.

The PanAm Corporate Empire?

The dominant paradigm for analyzing the US and geopolitics these days, a paradigm explicit in both Todd’s and Byrd’s books as in many others, is an inexorable shift from republic to empire. The analogy of ancient Rome underlies and informs this paradigm.

Todd, on the one hand, shows us this transformation unfolding from a European perspective, detailing for us how the American economy has changed from the industrial powerhouse that it was after WWII to the collosal trade deficit superpower and consuming machine that it is today. He shows us the meteoric rise of the American plutocracy, moreover accurately pointing to this plutocracy’s globalized non-American character, and their deliberate pauperization of the American (formerly) middle-classes. (On this topic see Joyce Marcel's recent piece "Shark Bait.")

Having fully reached a “bread and circuses” stage in our economic empire, he also very perceptively suggests that the rest of the world has become quite addicted to American over-consumption. In brief, the predatory character of the American economy has very quickly become a broad parasitic symbiosis among the world’s nations. Other countries need the United States to import the goods which they overproduce in their own industrial and manufacturing driven economic revolutions, and without this insatiably devouring maw in North America, the rest of the world would stagnate from the diminished demand for its goods.

My own perception of the state of affairs in the United States is in line with Todd’s assessment. I published here on 1/16/2005 thoughts that tended the same way, which I had written during the holiday break—amidst both our annual Saturnalia of carnivalesque over-consumption and the specific chaos of a hijacked 2004 election.

See my post “Producers and Consumers”.

Todd is describing from afar what I diagnosed from personal experience as America’s “postconsumer state of capitalist development.” Mindlessly and irrationally consuming, our culture’s most eloquent symbol is the landfill and the garbage truck. We ritualize the processes of consuming disposable items, and we have become quite addicted to our own pollution.

But to return to Todd, Byrd, and my “a-hah!” moment this morning as I pondered a world atlas.

If Todd gets it right on the “bread and circuses” phase of American empire, Byrd summons up a bleak report on the novus ordo Neoconensis in Washington. Among the other details of executive power consolidation, two chief successes have turned the old tri-partite system into a new order that is dominated by the White House.

The Patriot Act set us down the path toward an arbitrary judicial dictatorship, one where an ostensible war on terror, endless and global in scope, is eroding the distinctions between civil and military law. Already commenced, with symptoms too numerous to mention—but including “extraordinary renditions,” detainee prison camps, the category of “enemy conbatant” etc.—the militarized character of law enforcement and judicial proceedings may soon spill over into a more rampant crackdown on “crimes” in the United States itself. (Keep an eye on the news for “treason” trials.)

The Patriot Act and its sequels are seeking to undermine the civil liberties of American citizens, as well as the proper balance of independent powers between the state’s executive, military, and judicial spheres and their functioning.

The Department of Homeland Security, on the other hand, first of all has done virtually nothing to make us safer. What it has done, however, in Senator Byrd’s assessment, is to further erode the two chief checking balances of the legislative branch, the power of the purse and the authority of oversight.

By consolidating previously separate federal agencies into one superagency under new management carefully proscribed within executive purviews of appointment and control, Congress gave away at one fell swoop huge tracts of its traditional spheres of oversight and appropriations authority.

The Secretary of Homeland Security is appointed by and acts from the White House. The first, Tom Ridge, refused to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee concerning the use of funds that were being demanded from the White House for the new DHS. It seems unlikely that the second Secretary, Michael Chertoff, will be more willing to involve Congress openly in carrying out its duties, since the Department is now, by legislative fiat, within its rights to ignore Congress as it pleases.

So now we Americans live in the “Homeland,” a new pauperized creation of the right-wing capitalist coup that has been carried off with astounding success and speed.

And if Todd is right in his prediction that “there will certaintly not be in, say 2050, an “American Empire” because the United States simply does not have what it takes to be a true empire,” this should not be taken—as he himself seems to—as an indication that some less imperial and benign configuration of power is almost inevitable in the geopolitical future.

Indeed, I would grant that the United States may not become a “true empire,” but that instead already an entirely new configuration of geopolitical power is being consolidated that is DISLOCATED from the nation state of the United States as it is known today, with the shape that it has had since the 1950s when Hawaii and Alaska become the last two stars on the flag.

Instead, the empire that looms over the planet is a global capitalist empire. This global imperial capitalism is not fettered to the history, ideals, values and aspirations of the mythic Enlightenment America of democratic experience and experiment.

Indeed, the globalized “overclass”—as Michael Lind called them, and whom Todd summons up in his analysis—are not really tied to the United States itself other than for the profit motive. The imperial capitalists, whether American citizens or not, are more than willing to “leverage” (to use one of their favorite faux-concepts of business strategy) any and all the resources available within the current U.S. nation-state, but they do so in strictly corporatist terms: maximizing advantage and profit, while minimizing liability, risk, and social obligation.

The “overclass,” whom I will call the corporate imperialists or imperial capitalists, are a loose competing federation of those with the requisite means to play at the table of global capital. It doesn’t really matter how one acquires the minimum buy-in to participate in the game, and this is why the overclass is a hodge-podge of bootstrapping industry barons, grey and black market gangsters, career politicians, MBAs, confidence driven CEOs, CFOs, and corporate board tycoons. Together they comprise the industrial capitalist military superstructure which is in the process of globalizing. This process in turn threatens to entail the supercession and obsolescence of the sovereign nation state as a significant entity in politico-economic affairs.

Several signs—the deliberate pauperization of the American people, the massive exodus of American business and capital to bases abroad, the belligerent anti-state and anti-social activities of the current government—seem to indicate that the old dream America, the land of freedom, prosperity, opportunity, justice, equality, the America that has inspired the world towards democracy and social progress, has become a burden if not a liability to the managers of the capitalist empire. It may be more profitable to kill off the ideal, by demoralizing and silencing us into submission, than to allow the status quo of our hypocritical cultural charade to continue to play out.

But for now, the charade does go on, and education has not quite yet succumbed entirely to a Christian conservative backlash against science and reason. Our national theater of culture still plays out within the old bounds of the “United States,” a country defined by its West and East coasts, centered on the Northeast centers of Washington D.C. and New York, on the “right” coast, and L.A., San Francisco and Seattle on the “left” coast, with the Greater Middle America in between these two geographic poles.

All Americans understand their country as being so composed. From Atlantic to Pacific, from “sea to shining sea,” “from California to the New York Island” etc. But this America is, like all nation states, a convenient and arbitrary fiction. It has not existed in this form for even a hundred years, and it will certainly change sometime in the future.

Moreover, it is already clear that for the global imperial capitalists, this cultural theater of the old America is becoming quaint, and is no longer true to the real shape of the world. In fact, it is probably a quite convenient smokescreen for the real state of affairs, which can be seen glimpsed readily enough if one gazes on a map of the world—and particularly the Americas—with just a little bit of insight and imagination.

Let me put this boldly. Let us think like an imperial capitalist for a moment, intent on “leveraging” all available resources into a system of economic and political domination of maximum profit and minimum “risk” (regulatory obligation, tax liability, etc.). If you want to consolidate power over the Americas, where will you locate the center of that imperium?

The optimum center of power in the New World is the Caribbean Basin and the Gulf of Mexico

A look at the map confirms that this area already operates as a circular network of capitalist enterprise and military-political control. The key links in the circuit are Houston, Texas; in Mexico, Monterey and (secondarily) Mexico City; the Panama Canal Zone, Maracaibo and Caracas in Venezuela (as flashpoints of conflict); the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and (far to the north but with the same function) Bermuda, serve as offshore caging stations for global capital; and now Guantanamo Bay opens a new chapter of covert military operations; Miami, Tampa and New Orleans complete the circuit on the U.S. side.

In a world of easy jet transportation, it is but a short hop by air from any one of these locations to the next along the chain. The comings and goings of persons and material is easy and hard to trace both for the military and the civilian capitalist overclass, with their private learjets and ease of access to small local airports. Geographical space is nothing for the overclass, and with electronic transfer capabilities, money and other assets can zip from one location to another instantaneously at the click of a mouse or with a quick transaction by cellphone.

From Houston to Monterrey is barely more than an hour by plane. Straddling the increasingly soft border between the U.S. and Mexico—a border that is strategic most of all for maintaining a chaotic “free-trade” zone of unregulated industrial exploitation to the south, while maintaining American standards of living to the north—Houston and Monterrey are the emerging finance, capital, industrial, and petrochemical centers of the North American capitalist empire.

Houston’s imperial capitalists, to whom most in the Bush Administration are either directly or indirectly tied, view the world from a petrochemical perspective.

To their south they view the Gulf of Mexico as a lucrative sea of drilling opportunities; hundreds of drilling operations—“jackups,” “platforms,” and “floaters”—troll the murky waters sinking their drill-pumps into the subsea floor to pipe up yet more black gold, or “ancient sunlight,” as Thom Hartmann has called fossil fuels.

(btw, see Hartmann's expose of Bush's lie about America "lacking an energy policy")

To begin contemplating the enormities of the industry from its own perspective, visit http://www.ods-petrodata.com/Home?newURL=opd
and http://www.worldoil.com/
and http://www.oilonline.com/store/directory.asp

And to explore the regulatory agency, the Mineral Management Service (MMS), that oversees it (part of the Dept. of Interior). http://www.gomr.mms.gov/index.html.

The regulations and laws that govern these resource concessions seem as murky as the sea itself and are apparently quite rigged in favor of business. Recall in 2002 when the President teamed up with his brother Jeb to stop some drilling for natural gas and oil off Pensacola and in the Everglades. A ploy clearly designed to score Governor Jeb Bush some much needed points with environmental activists in his state, regarded another way this deal was yet another federal payout to the favored petro-industries. American taxpayers were to pay more than $200 million to Big Oil companies in exchange for them not drilling on the leased lands. At our expense, Bush got to siphon some millions to his oil buddies, and help his brother out in Florida with some political advantage.

(see news report on the incident)
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I worked on this text all day, and since it has no end in sight for this evening I will post this and continue an exploration of the shifting centers of the capitalist empire in the next few days, including a look at the very current debates over CAFTA-DR, which includes some very strong propaganda from the White House, including Condoleeza Rice and the Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. I want to consider the Panama Canal Zone, the Venezuelan question, and the look of Guantanamo Bay as the budding penal colony for the new capitalist military empire.

For now, let us be wary of global analyses that refuse to see the shifting of centers of power. At the very moment that the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the imperial government completely abandoned Rome and shifted to Constantinople, changing radically the course of European history for the next thousand years.

Some day it will no doubt be apparent and patent that Washington D.C. and the U.S. northeast are no longer centers of empire, American or otherwise. We will do well now to consider closely the processes and forces that might be tending to shift away from those old familiar centers of power. It’s there that we may glimpse the future—and perhaps, by focusing opposition energies appropriately, avert at least the grimmest of its possible versions….