ENERGY wAR

exterminism for the 21st century

- stan goff -

Copyright 2006 by Stan Goff

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. -James Baldwin

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction__________________________________5 The Energy Crisis is Here_______________________10 The Global Battlefield__________________________44 The Night of the Generals_______________________62 The War for Saudi Arabia_______________________65 Persian Peril__________________________________81 Energy & Homeland Security__________________113 Exterminism and the World in the Wake of Katrina__124 India Takes the Stage__________________________160 Training the White Nation______________________213

Introduction Energy War is a compilation, with a very little post-publication commentary, of a number of essays I have written over the past four years about the relationship between nature, society, and war at the beginning of the 21st Century. Special emphasis is placed on energy production and political conflict. Politically determined patterns of energy production and consumption are bringing the increasingly destabilized trends of international political economy into collision with the inherent limitations of the planets energy substrates in extremely significant yet unpredictable and dangerous ways. That relation between social power and the biosphere is not a one-way determination. The escalating disunion between the demands of world capitalist accumulation and the material availability of industrial energy is a recursive relation. Diminishing availability is factored directly and consciously into the decision-making processes of the worlds most influential political actors. So there is a powerful dialectical dynamic at work between social power and the material environment. That dynamic can metaphorically be described as a runaway train. Where that train might be headed is one of the speculations of this book. The other contention of this book is that this train has an engine, and that to stop the train, we will have to stop the engine and the people who are protecting and operating it. The Energy War which I argue has already started will take many forms, strategically, but also many forms culturally and ideologically. It was the patron saint of of dying British imperial rule, Winston Churchill, who said that In war every truth has to have an escort of lies. That escort appears as the production of knowledge and culture -certain kind of knowledge, and a certain kind of culture, that together constitute an ideology. And I use the term perjoratively. Ideology is the problem facing the masses of humanity if they are to be mobilized as political actors themselves. Ideology simultaneously conceals and reproduces existing power relations. Ideology conceals the socially determined aspects of phenomena like energy production and consumption, and renders them natural, ergo, beyond intentional intervention. Ideology also conceals the actual relations of power class power, gendered power, and national power that play a determinative role in both energy production and use, and corresponding political conflict including war. That is why, as part of offering a fragment of an interpretation, this book also attempts to identify and deconstruct some of the prevailing ideologies from the biological determinism of the Malthusians to the stubborn developmental fantasies of many on the left who have yet to grasp that physics is a zero-sum game. These misapprehensions contribute to the Energy Wars general opacity. We cannot fight what we cannot see; and there is no more effective blinder to mobilization and efficacy of struggle than orthodoxy of any stripe. Those who have seen some of my theses perhaps in earlier publications of the essays in this book are already familiar with my particular preoccupations on this topic. One will find that those theses are under revision here. It would be worrisome, I think, if anyones thinking failed to evolve over time on any subject; and that holds especially true for someone like me purportedly an expert of sorts on a few limited topics related to

war, but certainly a lay autodidact in the fields of energy physics, ecology, gendered power, and political economy. My preoccupations are not merely with the subject matter. Writers, journalists, and scientists always have agendas. Claims to the contrary, to objectivity, are selfdeluding at best and manipulative at worst. The claim of objectivity is in every case consciously or not a simultaneous concealment and reproduction of both male and class power. In short, objectivity is itself an ideological construct. My agenda with this book is twofold. On the one hand, I want to debunk fallacies about energy and the Energy War. On the other hand, I want to make a contribution to strengthening the social movements engaged in a politics of resistance. Specifically, I want to contribute to overcoming the historical differences between class, gender, national liberation (I include US civil rights movements within this category), and environmental resistance movements. The merger of these four great social movements is not only desirable from a strategic point of view, but in my humble opinion a reflection of the necessary merger of the deep insights of these historical trends, given the urgency of our task today. My own activism over the last five years has been largely against something we call militarism. This is the way social struggles develop. Movements are directed in opposition to not simply to power, but to the perceptions of power. Motives for opposition to the Bush administration ranges from plain partisan self-interest among Democratic Party operatives, to fringe-element anti-Semitism directed at members of the administration, to revulsion at hypocrisy, to loathing of cronyism and corruption, to the sense of betrayal of the libertarian impulse, to the aversion to machismo and aggression, to principled or religious pacifism, to anti-imperialism, to anti-capitalism. And these are not, as some might imagine, along some linear continuum, but qualitatively different perceptions with deep implications for the direction that social resistance takes. Resistance asserting itself in mass organizations is developed around some point of unity based on perceptions and analyses of what the problem is at the base of our grievance. There is general agreement among large numbers of people in the United States and the rest of the world that military methods and organizations are dangerous and that military solutions are increasingly favored by someone in power however one defines them and that the military itself, with its real people, has been centralized by the so-called neo-cons in both foreign and domestic policy, and that the military-industrial complex has insinuated itself into virtually every aspect of our social lives. Consequently, there is a national and international struggle developing against militarism however defined. This book will attempt to go a step deeper than militarism and identify from where this militarism emerges. A moments reflection will tell us that military organization and practice does not simply force its way onto center stage in a given society like a conscious actor. Metaphorical thinking like this can give rise to abstractions and false apprehensions of social reality. Even the Clausewitzs generalization, that war is politics by other means, while accurate as far as it goes, is still too general and superficial to explain todays actual wars. My own theses about gender and militarism in Sex & War (Lulu Press, 2006) attempted to trace the historical evolution of masculinity constructed as aggression and the periodic appearance in history of military masculinities as hegemonic sexualities. I was 6

explicit that militarism is a kind of cognitive place-marker for the all the various connections in history between warfare and culture. But I did not go into any detail about the social developments and trends that give rise to the current Energy War. This book will attempt to draw a few conclusions about those trends that point to the deeper systemic bases of todays militarism which will at some point have to serve as a wider basis of unity than simply a struggle against militarism. Social movements and the critical-intellectual developments that go with them have influence on the direction and success of these individual struggles, but they do not have the capacity to destabilize those systems. This is a very important point. Many of the anti-capitalist formations in todays global metropoles of North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, especially those with significant numbers of comparatively privileged youth, suffer from a kind of philosophical idealism that suggests one can simply persuade the masses of the truth about capitalism, that the masses will then rally to their logic, and that with the collapse of the system, the same masses will flock to the banner of (whichever) self-appointed vanguard (or, conversely among anarchists, that society will settle into some utopian stateless epoch). The reality is that the actual rank-and-file members of a society have an immediate, personal, and affective stake in stability no matter how imperfect that stability is. It is only when the combination of misery and repression becomes great enough, or when a system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, or when a new class grows dominant within the belly of the old, that deep social revolutions take place. Moral persuasion will not wean the United States off of its immense energy consumption. Neither will acts of individual adventurism like assassination, insurgency, and sabotage. These are only effective tactics in the hands of struggles that have evolved into mass-supported rebellion; and nothing like that is on the horizon in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, or Japan. There is much, however, afoot in places like Latin America. So alliances of resistance inside the US while fighting internally against the depredations of neoliberalism that are now spilling within our own borders like toxic floodwaters into the 9th Ward of New Orleans, and waging struggles at home that are reflections of imperialism abroad (environmental racism, gentrification, resurgent male violence against women, bankruptcy erasures of pension funds, etc.) will need to apprehend their own roles, in part at least, as hobbling wherever possible the ability of their own government to interfere with phenomena like the colossal continental drift occurring in Latin America today. Robert Biel, writing in The New Imperialism Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000), notes that [t]he periphery [or global South] is characterized by the incompleteness of its capitalism. Indeed, we are still waiting for proof that full capitalist development is a possibility in the South as it remains a persuasive argument that only socialism can develop the South at all. This makes revolution more likely, but it needs to be a socialism of a new kind. Socialism was supposed to be development from capitalism, but as capitalism itself was never fully established in the first place, socialism itself had to be rethought. In a sense, the incompleteness of capitalism could be an advantage because it means there are still functioning grassroots structures in the South which could form the basis of an alternative social system. (p.111) Essential to understanding the geography of this grassroots Biel describes is an appreciation of how energy consumption patterns have contributed to physical structures 7

in the overdeveloped capitalist metropoles patterns that materially and spatially undermine social solidarities, amplify alienation, and atomize society. Dr. Balihar Sanghera writes about Karl Polanyis theses of embeddedness (from Market Society: Social structures and embeddedness): Karl Polanyi challenged the economistic fallacy of liberal economic thinking that market relations and behaviour are universal models of human conduct. Polanyi argues that there are two versions of the economic. On the one hand, substantive economics concerns the provisioning of human needs through three different means of allocation reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange (i.e., gift exchange, kinship and communal systems, collective consumption as well as private market relations). On the other hand, formal economics is based on the model of means-end rationality implied by economising behaviour in conditions of scarcity, and typical of market calculation. In the modern contexts, the market comes to represent the economic institution, rather than one form of substantive provisioning among others. As market exchange becomes central to modern forms of economic organisation, market rationality dominates modern ways of thinking about economic action and motivation. In this way, the market society is characterised by the disembedding of market behaviour from a wider context of social relations, norms and institutions. Economic behaviour is isolated as a discrete type of social action, governed by the formal rationality of the market, and based on impersonal exchanges between buyer and seller. Polanyi sees exchange as a diverse system of interaction that may involve market elements, but which only in certain historical and institutional settings (a system of private property, money, price and particular norms and knowledges (i.e., market culture) takes on the formal character of a supply-demand-price market. Specific market transactions take on market qualities only within the already institutionalised setting of the market. The market model of exchange assumes a wider context of prices, competition and market culture, which are themselves socially constructed, and can involve different elements depending on the social norms, routines and institutions. One from the US need only remember, provided one is old enough, the differences in social life two to three decades ago and now. Local merchants and service providers were known, on a personal basis. Ones first job, in many cases, was not applied for through some formalized and aseptic process, but often acquired through kinship, familial or spatial. This is an aspect of embeddedness that is being materially and spatially eroded by the requirement to chase employment over long distances, by urban sprawl, by corporate monoculture, and all the other atomizing processes of late consumer capitalism. And the material substratum of these changes is what we inexactly call energy consumption. Embeddedness is a concept that we urgently need to understand and popularize in our struggles, I believe, because it is the interpersonal and cultural basis for durable social

solidarities. Without a conscious effort to build embeddedness into our political strategies, we will not build strong social movements that can seriously contest for political power. The strength of underdevelopment, as Biel points out, is that the atomizing tendencies of capitalism have not taken hold, and therein lies much of the reason for the immense success of popular struggles in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. That we have inadequately theorized it does not make this insignificant. In fact, one of the contradictions that transnational capital faces in this epoch is that the exploitative core-periphery relation is based fundamentally on the ability to super-exploit the periphery because of its extremely low cost of social reproduction a cost directly lowered by the dependence for survival on household economies (managed mostly by women) and non-capitalist kinship bonds. The very embeddedness of underdeveloped societies that creates the basis of continued capital accumulation in a period of deep crisis (which I will describe in more detail further along in the book) also serves to reproduce social solidarities that are potential platforms of resistance and even open rebellion. The central role of physical energy in this dramatic period cannot be ignored. Energy is, literally, power. The choice of the current political establishment to militarize both foreign and domestic policy is not, as many believe, a function of the moral reprehensibility of one administration or of its incompetence, even though they are both reprehensible and incompetent. We have been at war over fossil energy for some time, and given the fundamental imperative of capitalism to grow, a world war over energy each day increasingly takes on an aspect of inevitability. The essays in this book, while not originally conceived as parts of a book, zoom in and out on the manifold dimensions of this world war over energy. I offer them here as one small contribution to a much larger discussion, and in the hope that it can contribute as well to the development of stronger alliances between social movements that are anticapitalist, feminist, anti-racist, and intensely cognizant of the biosphere of which we are all a part.

The Energy Crisis is Here (Originally published in Counterpunch in August 2004) The Warning Shot Energy... is certainly linked to, or behind almost any international event, crisis, war, military adventure or environmental catastrophe that we are forced to witness almost any day, points out Andrew McKillop, a founding member of the International Association of Energy Economists and which are due either solely or mainly to our urban industrial civilization and fossil energy habitAttack of New York's Twin Towers can best be thought of as a warning shot. Three airplanes crashed into three nuclear power plants will produce three Chernobyl catastrophes this true catastrophe being deliberately downplayed, even lied about by such UN agencies as the World Health Organization until 2002 nearly 16 years after the event, because nuclear power, absurdly, is still believed in as a solution to expensive oil and gas. As with so many of the myths of the neoliberal age, the myth of nuclear energy being cheap, and oil and gas being expensive is the complete opposite of reality. McKillop puts his finger on the fact not only that nuclear is expensive and dangerous, but that the question of energy itself is so basic, so all pervasive, so universal, so widely misunderstood, so misrepresented by special interests, and so profound in its implications if we are to be at all serious about it, that we have to rely on independent macro-analysis of energy to put the issue in some kind of context. The Centrality of Energy as a Geophysical, Economic, Social, and Political Issue Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One oftendiscussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. -Joseph A. Tainter The failure to grasp the full significance of energy is based largely on our understanding of it as a seemingly endless commodity. I turn the ignition key, and the car starts. I flip the switch, and the lights ignite. But we cannot understand the significance of energy, or how our consumption of it is irrevocably changing the entire biosphere, without 10

understanding energy in a more basic and essential way. For this, a few definitions are helpful. Fecundity: The potential reproductive capacity of an organism or population, measured by the number of gametes (e.g. eggs), seed set or asexual propagules. Superfecundity: Superabundant fecundity or multiplication of the species. Punctuated equilibrium: a theory of evolution holding that evolutionary change in the fossil record came in fits and starts rather than in a steady process of slow change. Evolutionary complexity: ecosystems tend to become more complex the number of different species increases, and the number of dependencies and other linkages between species increases. Niche maximization: the tendency of any species to expand its population to the maximum extent possible within the physical limits inherent in the organism and its environment. Energy is the force that drives all change. Energy is bound with matter and keeps it in motion. The energy used by life on earth originated almost entirely from the sun, whereupon it was chemically bound up and concentrated by organic matter. The biosphere evolved as an ever more complex architecture of consolidated energy, first as simple life forms that gained energy directly from the sun, then as autotrophs that converted sunlight into metabolic fuel, and later as heterotrophs that consume autotrophs for the energy concentrated within them. The net energy available for use within the biosphere was increased over billions of years through super-fecundity, punctuated equilibrium, evolutionary complexity, and niche maximization. Until the appearance of human beings, however, all life forms in the biosphere used energy internally, that is, within each life forms own body endo-somatically. Only with the appearance of Homo sapiens (perhaps Cro Magnon) was the biosphere introduced to intentional, systematic, extra-somatic, or outside-the-body, exploitation of biomass-concentrated energy, first through the use of fire, then through the domestication of animals, and finally through the burning of organic material that was hundreds of millions of years in the making fossil fuels. Life on Earth is driven by energy. Autotrophs take it from solar radiation and heterotrophs take it from autotrophs. Energy captured slowly by photosynthesis is stored up, and as denser reservoirs of energy have come into being over the course of Earth's history, heterotrophs that could use more energy evolved to exploit them, Homo sapiens is such a heterotroph; indeed, the ability to use energy extrasomatically (outside the body) enables human beings to use far more energy than any other heterotroph that has ever evolved. The control of fire and the exploitation of fossil fuels have made it possible for Homo sapiens to release, in a short time, vast amounts of energy that accumulated long before the species appeared.

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-David Price The specific social forms most recently global, industrial, and expansionary (profit/growth-based) of this extrasomatic energy exploitation has set in motion an increasingly grave situation that is multidimensional and self-accelerating. It has transformed the face of the planet, expanded the human population and decanted it mostly into cities that are becoming seas of desperate misery. It has created the most dramatic species extinction in the earths history and begun the rapid carbonization of the earths atmosphere. And it has plunged the human species into cycles of increasing economic polarization and war. The evolution of this social form industrial capitalism has also put the developed nations on a runaway train most particularly the United States, where the whole society has been physically and socially designed around the private automobile. This runaway train aimed at a thermodynamic cliff that is less than 30 years away. Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. -Kenneth Boulding Energy is a material basis of all development, without exception. Any real account of our situation in the cosmos, in society, and as individuals must be based significantly on an account of where energy is originated, how it is changed into useful forms, and how society is organized to use that energy. Any account that ignores this contributes to the delusion that progress will continue in the present economic, social, and political paradigm. It will not. It is empirically provable that we cannot sustain our current energy use or the social organization that shapes that energy use. This is not a moral valuation, but a scientific one. The current system will end, as a mathematical certainty, and the choice before society is not whether it will end, but how. If this claim is valid, any useful course of action must be established directly on the assumptions that (1) there is an existing energy crisis and (2) this crisis can only be addressed within the context of systemic social change that pays direct attention to energy use and development. Developing and commercializing carbon-free power technologies by the mid-21st century could require efforts, perhaps international, pursued with the urgency of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo space program, says Martin Hoffert, a physicist at New York University, during a forum on global warming. Implicit in that is political will, and implicit in political will is a profound shift in political power. We cannot leap over these preconditions. I will add two more. (1) It cannot be done through commercialization. The capitalist accumulation process is central to the problem, and is intrinsically incapable of producing solutions. (2) Technology cannot and will not be the centerpiece of any energy emergency landing. Conservation will be. There is no getting around this. It is a simple syllogism. Energy is not created. There is less and less energy available for use. We must use less energy. As McKillop pointed out, energy impacts on the totality of social relations. Centralizing the issue of energy for alliance and coalition building has tremendous potential for harnessing a broad and diverse array of forces to affect that political shift. But 12

these forces, if they are to have any effect beyond merely adding new layers of commentary, cannot include the vested interests that currently thrive completely within the context of the existing profit/growth regime. Bureaucratic and for-profit organizations are driven by the imperatives that define them self-perpetuation and expansion of monetary value. It must be a movement that fully recognizes the inextricability of energy use and social relations, and therefore it must consist of people who are committed to fundamental social transformation. It must be an insurgent movement that jealously guards its independence from and maintains a fundamentally adversarial relationship to the current dominant interests and institutions of that very system, because its inexorable goal is the transformation of the entire paradigm. The Political Economy of Energy The beginning of the fossil fuel age was not simply a technological shift. It was a specific outcome of a specific set of historical circumstances. We cannot understand why global society is what it is now, without understanding its evolution. The late British historian Mark Jones describes the advent of human hydrocarbon dependency and the population explosion that accompanied it, as follows: Industrial capitalism was surely a response to a crisis of relative overpopulation which emerged in Europe and elsewhere by the end of the 17th century. But did industrial capitalism achieve a new (growth based) equilibrium, or was this solution no solution at all since it has done no more than bring about a huge new increase of population on a still more unsustainable basis? The population of Europe doubled from 100 million in 1650 to 200 million by 1800. And the rate of increase constantly accelerated. By 1789 Paris had more than 600,000 inhabitants, of whom at least 100,000 were vagrants: the foot soldiers of the French Revolution. London's population grew from 575,000 in 1750 to almost a million by 1801, 'including a mass of the bustling street-hawkers, pickpockets, urchins, and felons so well captured in contemporary prints.' [Paul Kennedy] The burgeoning population huddled into the cities from the countryside and inhabited 'sprawling slums of jerry-built houses, lacking water, light, heat, and sanitation... in the new manufacturing towns hordes of children lacked adequate health care, nutrition and education; gangs of unemployed agrarian workers attacked the new farming machines that had thrown them out of work; social protest was common, especially in years when poor harvests drove up the price of bread. By 1750 European economies were increasingly gridlocked, and hunger was common, especially in France. The agrarian revolution impacted the environment in destructive ways. Enclosing of commons destroyed the last great British forests, which had been under intensive pressure as competitive uses for timber proliferated. The most dangerous bottleneck faced by the British economy was the complete collapse of the iron industry as supplies of wood for charcoal 13

dried up. By 1700 Britain was importing iron wrought and pig-iron from Sweden, Spain and even the Urals. That this trade was profitable evidences the desperate straits the English iron industry was in. The iron famine affected the entire English economy and imperiled its defence. This was the background to British activity in India and the Far East. There were many attempts to solve the problem of smelting iron with substitutes, the most obvious being coke made from coal. These attempts did not succeed in solving the iron shortage until almost the end of the 18th century. When the solutions came they synergistically combined to provide the platform for industrial take-off. But there surely can no longer be any doubt that take-off happened largely because of fortuitous accident (available coal, but in waterlogged deep mines requiring the development of pumps and then steam engines). Jones elaborates in a separate essay: The Industrial Revolution began in England when a set of technologies fortuitously converged to overcome a shortage of energy and raw materials (principally iron and steel). The shortage emerged at the end of an extremely rapid cycle of proto-industrial development during the 17th and 18th centuries. The technologies of steam power and of iron-manufacture utilising coal instead of wood-charcoal had interdependent origins. The first railways and steam engines were developed in coal-mining districts to answer specific problems of deep shaft working, where coal had to be transported considerable distances and flooded mines had to be pumped dry Once the technologies emerged they swiftly became generalised, first to the iron and steel industries, then to textiles, machine building, transport, agriculture and arms manufacture The era of fossil fuel-based industry was launched and led to very rapid population increases, which consolidated the new system's dependence on its material and energy basis, which emerged in this fortuitous way at the beginning of the 19th century. World capitalism has enjoyed two centuries of sustained development since 1800. However the gigantic growth in social productivity, resource-use and population, the creation of a vast new built environment and the subordination of natural processes and resourcesystems, has never enabled capitalism to shake free of its initial pathdependence. On the contrary, capitalism today is more critically dependent on fossil fuels and the use of non-renewable resources than at any time in the past, and the absolute level of resource-extraction and energy use continues to grow. (end quote) Even as those finite resources are depleted. Consider the implications.

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With human beings, the biological and social cannot be separated except as analytical categories. In reality, human biological and social phenomena are in constant and inseparable interaction with one another. In fact, even that statement tends to describe dual phenomena, while the lived reality is more complex, dynamic, and unitary. On the subject of energy, there is a debate going on between one camp that says we are expanding beyond the earths carrying capacity and another that says the problem is not biological but social. Each camp has occupied one pole in the same false dichotomy, based on the substitution of analytical categories for material complexity, and therefore the tendency to pose them against each other as opposites, which they are not. The carrying capacity camp has made the error of accepting genetic predestination as the cause of this population expansion, and failed to grasp the socialhistorical character of all human relations which has been determinative of population expansion. But this camp is right that the earth has a carrying capacity. The social camp has made the error of denying the physical reality of carrying capacity, but they are correct that human economic activity is not solely genetically, but overwhelmingly socially, determined. It must be of relevance that the United States share of world energy consumption is 25%, while 20% of the worlds people do not have access to enough energy to successfully maintain their own body metabolism. This obviously also has an environmental dimension. The richest 20% of the worlds population consume 86% of the aluminum, 81% of the paper, 80% of the iron, and 76% of the lumber. Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in 1990 were around five tons in the United States but only 0.1 tons in India. (Remarkably, however, many people in the industrialized [global] North continue to believe that it is their mission to educate people in the [global] South on how to live and produce sustainably, as if the North was setting a good example, and as if environmental problems in the South were the result of ignorance rather than impoverishment.) -Alf Hornborg We dont simply maximize our niche as other species do, we actually build new niches, and exactly how those habitats are built is largely determined by the interfusion of geography, technology, and socio-economic-political organization. Moreover, the sociopolitically-constructed habitats themselves then restructure human social relations and human consciousness. Roadside stands in Haiti, for example, cannot be replaced by strip malls, because most Haitians do not have automobiles, nor do they have the money to buy expensive consumer goods. In the US, on the other hand, most people would be incapable of obtaining food (grown a thousands miles away) or a job to get the money to buy it without an automobile to get to the vast, refrigerated, centralheat-and-air, super-lighted energy sinks that are strip malls and supermarkets. The human niche has been over-maximized based directly on energy use, but under the imperatives of a competitive system that is fundamentally based on expansion. The later is not inevitable.

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Whether that imperative was direct, as in the capitalist imperative to expand or be consumed by competitors, or indirect as in socialist projects that were driven by geopolitical and military competition (paradoxically forcing socialist systems to compete within a capitalist world system), the whole system has been based on something called growth. With this economic expansion comes population expansion. Population expansion within growth economics has not merely been an arithmetical phenomenon, but one that is qualitative characterized importantly by mechanized agriculture that has pushed populations off the land and progressively urbanized larger and larger fractions of the worlds gross population. Fossil fuel has permitted us to build huge cities in climates that bordered on hostile to human habitation, whether that involves the air conditioning required in Riyadh or the heating required in Toronto. By 3000 BC, the earths human population was roughly 50 million. Exploitation of biomass and animal power contributed to doubling that population by 1000 BC. Metallurgy and agricultural innovation set off a population breakout around then, and the population jumped almost to 300 million by 1 AD. Population growth stabilized for the next 1500 years, where proto-industrialization and crop rotation created an uptick from 1500 until around 1850 that brought the world within reach of the 1 billion mark. Plotted on a graph, this whole process up until 1850 looks like a gently rising, slightly bumpy slope. From 1850, however, with the introduction of widespread use of fossil fuel, until the present, one cannot extend the same graph on any standard sheet of paper, because the spike from under 1 billion to over 6 billion happens in so short a time, just over 100 years. This sends the graph line shooting steeply up from the end of the 19th Century, then straight into the air like a Titan missile. The fossil fuel that powers this growth, we must remember, took hundreds of millions of years to form as biomass (like the green algae that is currently presumed to have turned into oil). In fact, the predominant form of that fossil energy, oil, is a good marker to see into our energy future. We have used approximately half of all the extractible oil in the earth. This is a situation described empirically by Dr. Richard Duncan in his 1996 paper, The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age, as the transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization, wherein a rapidly growing population increasingly dependent on higher and higher inputs of fossil fuel sets a trendline of higher demand even as the actual fuel goes into permanent decline. Measuring civilization by per capita energy consumption chronologically, Duncan observes that with world oil production peaking approximately right now (2002-2010) world per capita consumption has been in decline since around 1980, and will continue to decline into perpetuity. This is more than some historical cycle, explains Duncan, the endless rise and fall of civilizations. [This is] about something quite different, more profound, more pervasive. Global industrial civilization has no cycles at all. (italics his) It is a one shot affair. Exponential growth, exponential decline. Thats it. This is, of course, a very important starting point. It starkly tells us what will happen if we continue on the same course that by 2030 or thereabouts we are likely to have returned to the per capita energy consumption of 1930, en route to harder, darker, colder times still. But it isnt the whole story.

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Beyond Empiricism: Energy and Social Systems Empiricism: the philosophical theory that attributes the origin of all our knowledge to experience. Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. -Willard Van Orman Quine Mark Jones recounting of the dawn of hydrocarbon capitalism reminds us that the world is a complex, geographically and socially diverse place, and that human development is driven not by some genetic program, but by a combination of dynamic historical forces that include necessity, conflict (especially gender, national, and class conflict), conscious decision-making, and not infrequently the unintended consequences of ill-informed decisions. The ability to change outcomes is not the same as the ability to control outcomes. The United States is now involved in war, intended to extend its control over the most oil-rich region in the world, but that war is rapidly becoming a military and political quagmire. Only the most stubbornly self-delusional elements in society still believe that oil had nothing to do with the US decision to invade Iraq. That is why it is important to see not only the empirical analysis of energy, but to understand the social and political relations of energy. The energy crisis is manifesting itself socially and politically, politics here meaning struggles for power. Empirical information arrived at through a process of direct observation and quantification is essential to the whole scientific method. But failure to account for reality beyond that which is empirically observable, that is, failing to account for not merely data, but the relationships and interactions of people and the environment in the real world, is an error sometimes referred to as empiricism, especially the reduction of social complexity in the world system to singular numerical indices like world per capita consumption. This dredges up some long standing controversies, but it is absolutely necessary to engage that controversy here and take sides. In our case, a couple of great debates come to mind; that between Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx and that between fellow Darwinists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Richard Duncan, quoted above and cited on his Olduvai Theory, might be called a neo-malthusian. Neo-malthusian reliance on broad numerical averages supports a case that this impending disconnection between energy availability and population is a population problem. Beneath the argument that population is the central problem is the notion, as Duncan says, that, Long ago, nature dealt us a bad hand were sexually prolific, tribal, short-term and self-centered. And after thousands of years of trying, Culture hasnt changed that. In other words, its in the genes. Human nature is responsible, and it is unalterable. 17

But while worldwide per capita production of oil peaked decades ago, American per capita consumption has steadily increased. How does Duncans biological determinism explain this? There is quite obviously something more than a genetic predisposition at work here. There is an issue of power, of politics, interests and intent. Professor Martha Gimenez of the University of Colorado describes Malthus biological determinist view in her 1973 paper, The Population Issue: Marx vs. Malthus: Malthus' argument rests upon two propositions; unchecked population increases in a geometrical ration while subsistence increases in an arithmetical ratio. The two propositions together constitute the famous principle of population which, according to Malthus, is "... one of the causes that have hitherto impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness" (Malthus, 1933:5). This cause is "intimately united with the very nature of man ... (it) is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it" (Malthus, 1933:5); "...its natural and necessary effects (are) ... a very considerable portion of that vice and misery, and of that unequal distribution of the bounties of nature which it has been the unceasing object of the enlightened philanthropists in all ages to correct" (Malthus, 1933:5). Malthus bases his principle of population on a natural law; the tendency of all animated life to increase beyond the means available for its subsistence. The natural law of population growth is checked by another natural law; the law of necessity which restrains that growth within certain boundaries and keeps it down to the level of the means of subsistence. Within the human species the natural law of necessity operates through various checks which fall under two main categories: a) preventive checks which control fertility (i.e., moral restraint or marriage postponement, and vice). b) positive checks which increase mortality or the probability of dying (i.e., "unwholesome occupations, ... poverty ...great towns and excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, war, plague and famine:) (Malthus, 1933:14). Note that social norms and culture are subsumed under natural law, like marriage and vice. Gimenez points out that neo-Malthusians, those who today subscribe to the same natural-law premises as Malthus, generally implying that human culture and society are an outgrowth of linear genetics and fecundity, and expands that explanation to encompass all natural resources. Gimenez then describes Marxs rebuttal of Malthus: At the most general theoretical level Marx and Engels see in Malthus principle of population another instance of the way economists reify social relations to reify means to change concrete historical social relations and processes into universal categories or eternal natural laws. Malthus begins with the results of the process of capitalist development before him; i.e., widespread poverty, hunger, unemployment, etc. and, disregarding the concrete social relations of exploitation and competition which had produced that hungry and unemployed population, 18

he views it as the outcome of the operation of inexorable natural laws Poverty, unwholesome working conditions, hunger, disease, unemployment, etc. are depicted as the product of the natural law of necessity which in that way checks the functioning of another natural law; the tendency of all animated life to reproduce itself beyond the means of subsistence. The crux of this great controversy, of course, is whether human nature is genetically determined, or whether that nature is influenced by society and its relations. It has long been the tendency of those at the top of any social hierarchy to prefer narratives that make that social order either divinely ordained or a product of natural law. This is an epistemological controversy first, and only later a political one. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. It attempts to answer the basic question: what distinguishes true (adequate) knowledge from false (inadequate) knowledge? Practically, this question translates into issues of scientific methodology: how can one develop theories or models that are better than competing theories? It also forms one of the pillars of the new sciences of cognition, which developed from the information processing approach to psychology, and from artificial intelligence, as an attempt to develop computer programs that mimic a human's capacity to use knowledge in an intelligent way. When we look at the history of epistemology, we can discern a clear trend, in spite of the confusion of many seemingly contradictory positions. The first theories of knowledge stressed its absolute, permanent character, whereas the later theories put the emphasis on its relativity or situationdependence, its continuous development or evolution, and its active interference with the world and its subjects and objects. The whole trend moves from a static, passive view of knowledge towards a more and more adaptive and active one. -Principia Cybernetica Stephen Jay Gould, the pre-eminent biologist who died in 2003 (as did Mark Jones, a double loss), actually expanded the point of view of dynamic environmental influence into the study of evolution, and engaged a decades-long debate with biologist Richard Dawkins, who identified something called the selfish gene as the singular motive force in evolution. This controversy spilled over into social debates, with empiricist Dawkins cited by defenders of The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), a book that claimed to demonstrate racial superiority, and Goulds rebuttal in his own re-released book, The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), now heavily quoted by opponents of high-stakes standardized testing, his use of the male-normative Man notwithstanding. Dawkins, a student of animal behaviour under Niko Tinbergen, works with a number of tacit axioms. First is that you can ask, for any behaviour or function, a why question in terms of adaptive function. Second is that you can ask this largely without knowing or caring what the genetic and physiological mechanisms involved are; the mechanisms do it somehow, 19

and selection acts on their output. As far as adaptive explanation goes, they are a black box. The third is that, of all the various types of explanation in biology, the adaptive one is the linchpin, the master key. This is because it is this alone which really tells us why; all other accounts merely tell us how. It is of course a short step from these premises to the view that adaptation is a universal moulder of forms and behaviour, and adaptationism a universal acid for dissolving away scientific problems. Gould by contrast is a paleontologist, and as such long schooled in the difficult reconstruction of the details of the past. In particular, paleontology has been concerned with multi-leveled patterns of organisation in the fossil record; species and radiations, guilds and kingdoms, stasis and change. What counts as explanation is in many respects a description of pattern, one that captures all the relevant complexity. It is thus no surprise that Goulds view of evolution is one of many-leveled patterns and contingencies, not reducible to any master force like gene-level selection. -Kim Sterelny

Gould does not discount the value of reductive science that operationalizes questions to be answered by the experimental (empirical) method. But Dawkins reduces the question of evolution to a single determinant, the selfish gene. Gould, by contrast, is a systemscomplexity person, because physical, biological, geological, and social realities do not act in a laboratory setting but in a dynamic and non-linear relation to one another. Systems cannot be accurately theorized solely based on empirical, atomized data. They are by definition relational, and evolving relations cannot be reduced to mathematically-expressed observations. I am with Jones, Gimenez, Marx, and Gould on the energy question. And the neoMalthusians are on a very dangerous ideological slope where they can easily slip into racism and xenophobia, as some so-called environmentalists have already done. The empiricists have identified a very serious consequence if we continue on the same path, and the energy crisis is quite real (We will show further on just how real in many ways). But if we accept their premise that it is genetically predetermined, then we might as well party on until the lights go out, because theres nothing we can do about it. Research into the structure of the brain by psychobiologists and anthropologists have, in fact, supported non-determinist mental plasticity with the identification of mirror neurons and their functional receptivity to social conditioning, even when this conditioning does not provide any identifiable evolutionary advantage in the Darwinist sense. Cognitive neuroscience is showing us that we are biologically determined to be not biologically determined. It is also supporting the thesis that social systems thereby reproduce themselves in the human psyche with tremendous power. There is a population aspect to our problem, but it is not a population problem. It is a social-system problem. Here is an outline of our social-system problem. The earths climate is being transformed and the biosphere is being dangerously decomplexified by fossil fuel combustion.

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The health of the global economy is now measured by the indices that measure profit the self-expansion of monetary values that depends on expansion or growth, which depends on ever-higher inputs of fossil fuel. It is physically impossible to develop the whole world in a manner similar to Europe and America. There is not enough iron, there is not enough petroleum, etc. Moreover, those advanced societies are not sustainable in their present form for more than two decades. The current energy regime depends overwhelmingly on fossil hydrocarbons. The entire society is structured for hydrocarbons so extensively that it is physically impossible to replace current consumption within existing sectors at existing levels. World oil production is peaked, even as the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, India, and China are all projecting massive increases in oil consumption which objectively makes them competitive antagonists. Most of the worlds remaining easily extractable oil is in one region that is being destabilized by this competition which has now become an energy war. Capitalist industrialized agriculture now depends on current or increasing levels of fossil fuel.

Growth and Sustainability Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. -Albert Bartlett There is a growing body of pseudo-scientific rebuttal of global-warming proliferating with the support of vast profit-driven enterprises that depend, in a variety of ways, on the continued and expanded use of fossil energy. Most of this polemical nonsense is done by scientists who are un-respected in their fields, and most is not peer-reviewed to test its validity. This so-called critique is aimed not at scientists, who largely accept that human activity in particular, the use of fossil fuel has caused an unprecedented atmospheric shift in the last century and a half. This propaganda is aimed at people with limited or no scientific acumen, and emphasizes the unanswered uncertainties in the body of scientific research on climate change. In fact, uncertainty is exactly what science seeks by determining the limits of certainty. The scientific method does not answer all questions. It seeks to answer a question at a time, to the exclusion of other questions. Science does not conclude. It either reinforces or weakens existing interpretations. The uncertainties argument made by industry-and-ideology groups is a logical fallacy called a red herring, designed to cast enough doubt on the alarm being raised about global warming to reinforce the publics fear-induced denial. 21

Red Herring: a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form: 1. Topic A is under discussion. 2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A). 3. Topic A is abandoned. This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim. Industry-supported junk-science goes a step beyond logical by publishing patently false claims and, with astonishing gall, referring to the conclusions of the majority of reputable scientists as junk science. In some cases, these reports emanating from the plethora of front organizations posing as public interest groups actually claim that there is no real evidence that global temperatures have risen as a result of human causes. Science for the last decade has conclusively debunked this assertion. Another claim was that computer models of climate change have predicted far more warming than satellite records actually show. This is also categorically untrue. The Union of Concerned Scientists state: The scientific consensus around climate change is robust. To make this point clear to policy makers in Washington, D.C., more than 1,000 scientists from across the nation have signed the State of Climate Science letter. This letter, from experts in the field, outlines the consensus on the anthropogenic component to climate change. In doing so, the letter reconfirms reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council that the consequences of climate change, which is driven in part by emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, will be both disruptive and costly to the United States Anthropogenic climate change, driven by emissions of greenhouse gases, is already under way and likely responsible for most of the observed warming over the last 50 yearswarming that has produced the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere during at least the past 1,000 years; Over the course of this century, the Earth is expected to warm an additional 2.5 to 10.5 F, depending on future emissions levels and on the climate sensitivitya sustained global rate of change exceeding any in the last 10,000 years; Temperature increases in most areas of the United States are expected to be considerably higher than these global means because of our nation's northerly location and large average distance from the oceans; Even under mid-range emissions assumptions, the projected warming could cause substantial impacts in different regions of the U.S., including an increased likelihood of heavy and extreme precipitation events, exacerbated drought, and sea level rise;

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Almost all plausible emissions scenarios result in projected temperatures that continue to increase well beyond the end of this century; and; Due to the long lifetimes of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the longer emissions increase, the faster they will ultimately have to be decreased in order to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system. Evidence that climate change is already under way includes the instrumental record, which shows a surface temperature rise of approximately 1F over the 20th century, the accelerated sea level rise during that century relative to the last few thousand years, global retreat of mountain glaciers, reduction in snow cover extent, earlier thawing of lake and river ice, the increase in upper air water vapor over most regions in the past several decades, and the 0.09F warming of the world's deep oceans since the 1950s. Evidence that the warmth of the Northern Hemisphere during the second half of the last century was unprecedented in the last 1,000 years comes from three major reconstructions of past surface temperatures, which used indicators such as tree rings, corals, ice cores, and lake sediments for years prior to 1860, and instrumental records for the interval between 1865 and the present.

The Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has collected ice cores that demonstrate a 30% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1860. The very idea that a quantum chemical shift of this magnitude in the atmosphere would not create profound changes in the climate is, on its face, worthy of ridicule. Global warming is real, but because the global climate is such a highly complex system, the sequence, intensity, and forms of its consequences cannot be known. Barring a dramatic change of course socially, however, we can be assured that these changes will be immensely destructive of human health and social stability. The rise of a few inches in sea levels would effectively inundate hundreds of millions of people around the world, salinize estuaries and destroy soil fertility, shift tropical disease vectors and pathogens further into temperate zones, and create unstable weather patterns that generate more catastrophic weather events in heavily populated areas. [Hurricane Katrina, for example, where climate change and malignant social neglect came together with a terrible force.] But fossil energy exploitation has more consequences than the unintended ones. Combined with growth-economics, fossil energy exploitation has given human societies the capacity to transform the material environment for economic purposes in unprecedented ways, as have fossil fuel bi-products, particularly in agriculture. The transformation of all of nature now even including its scenic vistas into marketable commodities is the dominant determinative force in growth-economies. The additional capacity added to that general tendency by fossil fuel is difficult to overestimate, and its impact tends to increase geometrically. Food, being necessary for individual human metabolism, is a special concern, and has a special place in global social patterns of energy use. Using plain input/output models for food production by 1994, Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel showed that one calorie of food requires approximately 10 calories of extrasomatic energy to produce. But 23

that is a global average. In the industrialized metropoles of Europe, the United States and Canada, Australia, and Japan, the average is 40/1. In the United States, it is around 90/1. Yet because of the global system of US dollar seignorage, which allows the US to print money to cover its enlarging debt to other nations (which, for reasons we wont go into until later, it never intends to pay back), effectively a subsidy to the whole United States from the rest of the world, the US percentage of disposable income spent on food is remarkably low -- around 15%. So if we set aside the monetary cost of food and focus solely on the energetic costs, and if we factor in variables like sun-energy and disparate gross production figures, US consumers on average are consuming five times the global average at below market value because of an external hidden subsidy provided by those throughout the world who are consuming less energy to eat. Again, however, we are immediately confronted with the inadequacy of an empirical model to make sense of the situation we are facing. We are not all consuming the same kind of food, and the reasons are structured not by human DNA, but by political economy. The same profligate energy waste that underwrites agriculture for the well-to-do nations underwrites the associated and equally destructive satellite activities to industrial, growth-based food production. Monoculture crop production requires more than fossil fuel and petrochemical inputs. It requires a social impetus. The same system of dollar hegemony described above not only forces foreign central banks to provide free loans to the US government, it creates a situation where underdeveloped nations need have large supplies of US dollars to pay their external debts mostly to the United States controlled International Monetary Fund. To get those dollars, they need to export to the United States. So, in effect, as Wall Street investment broker Henry C. K. Liu describes it, the US makes dollars, and the rest of the world makes things to get dollars. This imperative to export has transformed even the most underdeveloped nations into net food exporters, compelled by market imperatives to produce food on a monocultural, industrial model. That model is characterized by five major structural changes: the use of large tracts of land instead of small plots; the use of fossil-fueled mechanization to harvest, process, and transport the products; the need for massive and wasteful irrigation efforts; the applications of immense amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and the deracination of most rural people and their transfer to cities (the few who remain behind to labor for industrialized agriculture work for wages, another shift from the former system where they worked for a share of the product). Not only does this increase the ecological and energy footprint of those newly urbanized populations because urban living is more energy intensive than rural life in a global economy that has suffered a net contraction beginning in the 70s, it has added a much larger aggregate unemployed population to the world, now unemployed in the waged sector without access to subsistence agriculture to guarantee basic survival. So here is another example of a hidden connection between energy and social disorder what I will refer to as social entropy, or social disorder materially related to thermodynamic entropy as energy use (I will digress here only briefly into Ilya Prigogines thesis on dissipative structures). Prigogine's concept of "dissipative structures" (Prigogine & Stenger 1984; cf. also Adams 1982, 1988). Dissipative structures are systems which 24

stay far from thermodynamic equilibrium by continually drawing in exergy (negative entropy) from the outside and exporting the entropy, or disorder, they produce in the process. Erwin Schrdinger (1967:79) suggested that "the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment." This interpretation can be extended from biological to social systems (cf. Adams 1982, 1988). Societies also maintain their internal structure by drawing order from their environments. For hunter-gatherers this is generally a matter of exploiting other species in a fairly local, ecological context. For cities or world system centres, however, the maintenance of structure relies on exchange with other, peripheral social sectors more directly involved in the extraction of exergy from nature. This social dimension of exergy appropriation has proven very difficult to conceptualize in terms which can be integrated with the perspectives of thermodynamics. Bunker (1985:33) observes, for instance, that Adams (1982) has "not fully realized the sociological implications of his essentially physical formulation." -Alf Hornborg In other words, energy and order are drawn toward wealth and urban concentrations, and the dissipated waste and disorder are exported onto those with the least political power in social-geographical peripheries. This is what the environmental justice movement is about. And it has been this specific form of disordering economic expansion that has led to massive and crisis-wracked population increase, not population growth that has led to social disorder. Returning to agriculture itself, which under growth-industrialism becomes more inherently energy-intensive, it also requires other material inputs to keep up with expanded production, most significantly land and water. (It is a fact that organic and permaculture models of agriculture are far more productive per square meter than industrial agriculture, but these methods do not contribute to the bottom line of multinational corporations; they do not support high-volume, long distance exports; and they do not exploit land that is inherently not suitable for high-yield agriculture.) With the expansion of all energy-intensive industry, the requirements for large quantities of energy have increased, but with agriculture the increase and consequences have been phenomenal. Most of the worlds fresh water aquifers are being depleted far faster than they can recharge (with energy-intensive technologies facilitating the actual withdrawal of the water), concentrating the toxins in remaining aquifer and ground water supplies. Aquifers are not alone. Los Angeles now uses so much of the Colorado River that it often doesnt trickle to the sea. Soils are being toxified by fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, as well as salinized and abandoned when the have been rendered sterile. The need for more land has led to increasing deforestation. This is the exponential, runaway train effect, of modern high-energy agriculture that is at the very center of the current world system. As fossil fuel production begins its permanent decline with oil beginning almost immediately there will be a crisis in food production that will hit the newly urbanized unemployed peripheries with a terrible impact, and the reaction will be an equally terrible social fury. 25

Worldwatch describes how giant dams, massive irrigation systems, and widespread logging often bring few economic benefits, and instead cause environmental degradation, poverty, and suffering, as well as irreplaceable loss of biodiversity. Billions of dollars spent for flood control, plus the effects of land degradation, actually increased the severity and cost of flooding on the Columbia, Rhine, and Mississippi rivers. Pollution and diversion have driven freshwater fisheries into collapse worldwide, and the extinction of freshwater species far outpaces the extinction of mammals and birds. Wetlands worth billions of dollars to the public for fisheries, water purification, and groundwater renewal have been converted to less beneficial uses. Freshwater ecosystems are both disproportionately rich and disproportionately imperiled. Some 20% of 9,000 known freshwater fish species worldwide are already extinct or imperiled, with the toll much higher where human impact is heavy. * Land: On-going soil erosion and expanding urbanization contribute to the continuous loss of cropland in the U.S. Annually, more than two million acres of prime cropland are lost to erosion, salinization, and waterlogging. In addition, more than one million acres are removed from cultivation as America's limited arable land is Overwhelmed by the demands of urbanization, transportation networks, and industry. As a result of arable land shortages, U.S. meat consumption may be reduced. Water: The groundwater that provides 31% of the water used in agriculture is being depleted up to 160% faster than its recharge rate. The vast U.S. Ogallala aquifer (under Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas) will likely become non-productive within the next 40 years. Even if water management is substantially improved, the projected 520 million Americans in 2050 would have about 700 gallons/day/capita, considered the minimum for all human needs, including agriculture. Energy: The availability of non-renewable fossil energy explains in part the historically high productivity of U.S. agriculture. Currently the 400 gallons of oil equivalents expended to feed each American amount to about 17% of all energy used in this country each year. Yet given current use levels, only 15 to 20 years of oil resources remain in the U.S. Although imports now account for 58% of oil used in the U.S., these international reserves are expected to be exhausted within the next 30 to 50 years. -David Pimentel, Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, Istituto di Nazionale della Nutrizione, Rome Ocean fisheries are now imperiled by the same drive for profit, fuelled by diminishing fossil resources. The giant factory trawlers that prowl the oceanic fisheries 26

now drop giant bottom-scoops that pull in every species, including juvenile organisms and wreck the reefs that often define the habitat. Non-commercial species are killed and discarded. Interdependent species collapse alongside the fisheries with this meta-slash-andburn technique. So the eventual and inevitable decline of the fossil energy economy will not leave behind the potentiality for a return to a more sustainable existence, closer to nature, but a wrecked and grotesquely toxified and simplified biosphere. We are currently undergoing the most dramatic period of extinctions since the dinosaurs. There is consensus in the scientific community that the current massive degradation of habitat and extinction of many of the Earth's biota is unprecedented and is taking place on a catastrophically short timescale. Based on extinction rates estimated to be thousands of times the background rate, figures approaching 30% extermination of all species by the mid 21st century are not unrealistic an event comparable to some of the catastrophic mass extinction events of the past. The current rate of rainforest destruction poses a profound threat to species diversity. Likewise, the degradation of the marine ecosystems is directly evident through the denudation of species that were once dominant and integral to such ecosystems. Indeed, this colloquium is framed by a view that if the current global extinction event is of the magnitude that seems to be well indicated by the data at hand, then its effects will fundamentally reset the future evolution of the planet's biota. -Michael J. Novacek and Elsa E. Cleland This is the end result of a global economy that is driven by so-called growth and by the Cartesian fallacy that Man (notably, male is herein the default for human) is somehow destined to subdue Nature. It is a chimera, and a dangerous one at that, to believe that the motives at the heart of this system can lead us out of its dilemmas. Theft of Life of Future Generations Hornborg describes the antithetical outlooks of growth-ecology (or greencapitalism) proponents and anti-growth advocates as cornucopian and zero-sum respectively. The cornucopians insist that the world can grow its way into a sustainable future by adopting the proper forms of technology. The zero-summers insist that economic growth in one place is coming at a direct cost to the quality of life somewhere else. The cornucopians argue that with intelligently designed development (growth), there is actually a better chance of protecting the environment. They show the very strong correlation between rich countries and the comparatively positive numbers on preservation of forests, etc. They have even come up with a formula comparing GNP with loss of natural resources. To explain what is clearly a negative correlation between these numbers, they point out that richer economies demonstrate a tendency to become more and more based on provision of services, and that with greater wealth, populations become interested in conservation.

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But correlation is not causation, and this is a perfect example of it. Here is an example of Bouldings caustic comment about economists. It assumes that an economic activity and its environmental consequences coincide geographically. (Hornborg) They do not. Moreover, this fails to take into account issues like carbon emissions. If the cornucopian model is followed and development becomes uniform around the earth at the levels of the industrial metropoles, says Mathis Wackernagle, we shall need three more earths, because this one wont support that level of atmospheric carbon. Of course, development cant take that trajectory, because resources would run out in short order if it were even hypothetically attempted which under existing geopolitical circumstances, it wont. Growth, contrary to the magical implication of the cornucopians, does not cause ecological damage to dissolve. In fact, it is simply moved out of sight and out of reach of First World conservationists. An example of the conceptual consequences of cornucopian myopia can be found in Lester Browns Eco-Economy, a bible for green-capitalists. Published in 2001, Brown suggests that natural gas can be the step-one transition fuel to move toward the solarhydrogen economy. In outlining this scheme, he cites the cutting edge company working on this transition from gas to wind to hydrogen: Enron. Enron, a Texas-based natural gas company, is also keenly aware of the part it can play in the transition to the new energy economy. In recent years, it has purchased two wind companies, which gives it the capacity to exploit the vast wind resources of Texas. Enron. Brown goes on to decry rising birth rates in the under-developed world, and even connects fertility rates to womens education and access to family planning services. He does not, however, connect these voids in education and social services to the immense external debts that are extorted from these nations by Europe, the United States, and Japan. Moreover, he fails to correlate the per-capita energy/materiel consumption ratios between these nations to show the connection of net outflow of material from these countries that is transformed into higher levels of social complexity in the Northern core states. The flows of energy and material from the former [global South] to the latter [northern core states] tend to reduce complexity and power in the hinterland while augmenting complexity and power in the core. Extractive economies generally cannot count as a cumulative development of infrastructure as can the productive economies in the core, because [fossil fueled] economic activities in the former are dispersed and shifting according to the location of the extracted materials. As the stocks of natural resources become increasingly difficult to extract as they are depleted, and intensification of extraction will tend also to increase costs [and energy inputs] per unit of extracted resources, instead of yielding the economies of scale associated with intensification in the industrial core The luminous agglomerations of industrial infrastructure in the satellite photos are the result of uneven flows of energy and matter, and these processes of concentration are self-reinforcing because the increasing advantageous economies of scale in the center progressively improve its terms of trade and thus its capacity to appropriate the resources of the hinterland. Extractive 28

economies are thus pressed to overexploit nature, while those parts of the landscape in industrial nations that have not been urbanized can instead be liberated from the imperative to yield a profit and rather become the object of conservation programs. -Alf Hornborg In a very real sense, the current global growth economy is one where nations that have the economic and military power are able to pull order into themselves using the resources of weaker countries, and to export their entropy (thermodynamic and social) back to those countries. The world is finite, and the zero-sum school is right. And those in power know it. In late 1991, Lawrence Summers, the chief economist for the World Bank, delivered a confidential memo to a World Bank colleague. He asked: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?" Pointing to the cheaper economic valuation of human life, calculated by the lower wages of third-world workers, he boldly proposed, "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." -John Trumpbour It is physically impossible to develop the whole world in a manner similar to Europe and America. Moreover, those advanced societies are not sustainable in their present form for more than two decades. I have already shown how hypothetically bringing the whole world to the same level of consumption of food at its energetic value, not monetary would require an increase of energy inputs eight times the current global average. If 6 billion people used petroleum at the Euro-American-Australina-Japanese per capita rate, it would require production of 120 billion barrels a year. Right now, production is around 29 billion barrels. Not only would the oil, coal, and natural gas run out in fairly short order, so would copper, iron, etc. And a simple extrapolation of US greenhouse gas emissions tells a terrifying story, with the US alone creating 25% of world emissions by only 5% of the population. The laws of thermodynamics provide an immutable framework to all life on closed planetary systems such as ours. No advances in the science of energetics and no improvements in capital efficiency or in the productivity of labour, under any social system whatever, can prevent anthropogenic climate change as a result of human-made greenhouse gas emission. No substitute technologies such as nuclear, hydrogen or any other, can overcome the problem of planetary warming; even supposedly nongreenhouse technologies like nuclear power, if implemented on a wide enough scale to provide 9 billion humans with today's US per capita energy consumption. It would result in such significant ambient warming and the release of water vapour (a powerful greenhouse gas by itself) as to produce 29

the same risks of rising oceans, climatic change and even runaway, ecosphere-destroying warming. Any responsible scientist is bound to concede that no amount of technical improvement, progress etc, can overcome the iron limitations imposed on us by unalterable constraints determined by the limited size of the planet and the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore it is clear that current US living standards are achieved at the peril of the ecosphere and of all life on earth, and by the theft of life-opportunities from billions of fellow-humans living today in the Global South--and also by the theft of life and opportunity from all future generations, including America's. -Mark Jones The current energy regime depends overwhelmingly on fossil hydrocarbons. Jones point that these sources of energy cannot be replaced on a calorie-by-calorie basis with alternative energy sources is absolutely correct. Not even close. The Partys Over Many proponents of alternative energy center their discourse on achieving sustainability. To be sustainable, an energy source would have to be virtually perpetual (wind, solar, wave), replaceable through re-concentration (biomass), or rely on some nearly inexhaustible resource (theoretically hydrogen or fusion, but I will show later that these are modern-day alchemy). Proponents often present empirical data how many kilocalories a day of solar energy hit the earth, etc. or simply present alternatives that can transform energy into useful energy, with no reference to ultimate capacity, density, portability, stability, safety, ease of extraction, etc. Before reviewing so-called alternatives, it is important to review some energy basics (Thanks to Don Lancasters excellent on-line publication, Some Energy Fundamentals). In physics, force is something that pushes against resistance. If resistance is overcome to any degree, that is, if something is moved, that is work. Work, in the physics sense, is measured by an arbitrary but consistent standard. For example, if a force can lift a one-pound weight one foot straight up (directly away from the center of the earth actually), we refer to the quantity of that force as one foot-pound. Physical work, on the other hand is a reference to something that is affected. In this case, the one pound weight. The work is performed on the weight. The force that holds a spring closed is a force, not work. Work has to move something. Energy, on the other hand, is the capacity to do work. It can be latent (available, but not currently moving anything) or actual (moving something now). My fingers can access the energy to strike these keys. When I am thinking and not typing, that energy is latent. When I type, the energy is actual. 30

Energy comes in forms: thermal, chemical, electrical, etc. Those forms come packaged in different sources: heat (the thermal form) from sunlight (a source), heat from wood, heat from coal, heat from animal metabolism. Power is a combination of intensity and time. Power is the quantity of energy delivered for work over a specific time. Power is measured in different ways. British Thermal Units (BTU) measure heat. One BTU equals the heat energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. One volt of electricity successfully overcoming one Ohm of resistance is a current of one Ampere. The heat generated and lost to the environment by that resistance is one Watt. The intensity of one Watt for one second is called a joule. The availability or use of a Watt over one hour is one Watt-hour. An energy source contains energy. An energy carrier only moves it. A battery is an energy carrier. Hydrogen is an energy carrier. All energy carriers, with no exceptions in the physical universe, are energy sinks. Batteries are convenient for certain uses, but they are not cheap when you look at the power delivered. People with photovolactic-powered calculators are paying around $500 a kilowatt-hour for the power in them. Fortunately, they require very little power. An energy sink is any process that uses up more past energy than it returns as present and future energy. Energy density refers to how much energy is stored in how much volume or weight. These are not the same, and they are important. Volumetric energy density is how many watt-hours per liter, for example. Gravimetric energy density is how many watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline has a volumetric value of 9,000 watt-hours per liter. 150 Bar gaseous hydrogen, on the other hand, contains 405 watthours per liter. A 15-gallon gas tank would have to be replaced by a 334-gallon gas tank to carry around the same energy. This has a great deal to do with why we are at war over oil. Portability is another issue related to energy. Gasoline is relatively simple to contain and transport. Natural gas is far more difficult. Taking all these factors into account, we can now look at energy reality. The simple fact is that the world system as it is now constituted, in every facet, including technological development and population, has been fueled predominantly by fossil hydrocarbons, exclusively and irreplaceably in many sectors by oil. Any analysis that fails to confront this fact squarely is neglecting physics, specifically the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The reason this physical law related to energy is so important is that it is a law that cannot be broken. We cannot make energy, and when we dissipate it in work, it is gone for all practical purposes. Gone. It is not away on vacation.

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Second Law of Thermodynamics - This law states that heat can never pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. As a result of this fact, natural processes that involve energy transfer must have one direction, and all natural processes are irreversible. This law also predicts that the entropy of an isolated system always increases with time. The central question regarding alternative energy is whether and how it can replace fossil fuel and I will concentrate here on two sectors, transportation and electricity, beginning with oil. The first premise we have to face is that neither wood, hydropower, solar, wind, wave, tides, fission, geothermal, batteries, nor gas hydrates are interchangeable with oil. These can produce electricity, but electric batteries that store it cannot replace oil. Walter Youngquist, in Alternative Energy Sources Myths and Realities (Electronic Green Journal, December, 1998) explains: How to use electricity to efficiently replace oil (gasoline, diesel, kerosene) in the more than 700 million vehicles worldwide has not yet been satisfactorily solved. There are severe limitations of the storage batteries involved. For example, a gallon of gasoline weighing about 8 pounds has the same energy as one ton of conventional lead-acid storage batteries. Fifteen gallons of gasoline in a car's tank are the energy equal of 15 tons of storage batteries. Even if much improved storage batteries were devised, they cannot compete with gasoline or diesel fuel in energy density. Also, storage batteries become almost useless in very cold weather, storage capacity is limited, and batteries need to be replaced after a few years use at large cost. There is no battery pack which can effectively move heavy farm machinery over miles of farm fields, and no electric battery system seems even remotely able to propel a Boeing 747 14 hours nonstop at 600 miles an hour from New York to Cape Town (now the longest scheduled plane flight). Also, the considerable additional weight to any vehicle using batteries is a severe handicap in itself. In transport machines, electricity is not a good replacement for oil. This is a limitation in the use of alternative sources have where electricity is the end product. Batteries are also energy carriers, and therefore energy sinks. More energy is put into their production than what is retrieved for work in their use. This is not a technological deficiency, though some batteries are less inefficient than others but then far more expensive. This is a reality inscribed by physical law, which cannot be overcome through technology. Batteries cannot replace gasoline for vehicles. Not now. Not ever. To think otherwise is not merely technological optimism; it is technological religion the belief that somewhere, somehow, technology can solve any problem. This is quite simply not true. This points us to the question of interchangeability. All BTUs are not equal, because of form. We not only will never use batteries to fly airplanes or run eighteen wheelers, we will never use coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wave power to run these vehicles. Volumetric, gravimetric, and portability considerations remain paramount for specific energy applications. There are a handful of highly-expensive, 32

science-project electrical cars, but in the world there are almost 700 million automobiles (75% of them are private cars). That number is rising precipitously (30% in ten years if trendlines hold). They consume approximately half of the worlds gasoline. They continue to be produced along with replacement parts, and will continue to be produced barring some massive social cataclysm or transformation until the petroleum is no longer economically available. (Oil will never run out.) The petroleum is in fact about to go into an irreversible decline in production. C. J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, petroleum geologists working for Petroconsultants in Geneva, wrote in 1999 that world oil production would peak in approximately 2004 then go into permanent decline. Youngquist and Duncan of the Petroleum Engineering Program at UCLA predicted 2006. That was net oil. World per capita production, more important if we are looking at human needs, peaked in 1978. If, points out Dr. H. E. Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, it appeared that the development of alternative energy [were economically feasible, it] would be welcomed for the simple reason that if the burden of major energy use were to be removed from the oil industry, then their rapidly dwindling resource could be conserved for a longer period of time, and they could concentrate on the development of pharmaceuticals, plastics, synthetic fibers, etc., for which the profit margins are significantly greater. (italics mine) Puthoff goes on to explain that what remains to be proven [with regard to alternative energy sources] is whether the fundamental processes involved can be brought from proof-of-principle to engineering maturity so as to constitute market-viable energy resources. For 700 million automobiles aimed at becoming 800 million automobiles, there is no alternative to diminishing oil. That is precisely why energy companies have not invested in the research and development of these alternatives. There are no alternatives. Ethanol is touted by some who fail to understand two things. Industrially grown corn is its basis in the US (some countries are now using sugarcane), and it is severely destructive of soil and water. Even more importantly, perhaps, ethanol is an energy sink. Ethanol requires more energy inputs than what we get back from it. It is, in fact, a votebuying scheme that subsidizes agri-business for growing corn that neither the environment nor the economy needs. According to Pimentel, ethanol takes 71% more calories to make than it produces. This is disputed by alternative energy buffs who claim that sugar beets can yield an energy positive in the production of alcohol, but even though this may be theoretically true, it fails to account for the ecological downsides of monocrop industrial agriculture on the scale necessary to replace oil, which would be, again, massive soil salinization and depletion, and additional strain on depleting aquifers. Its all connected. For producing electricity, the alternatives most often considered are nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, waves, and hydrogen. Nuclear not only creates extremely dangerous material that will remain dangerous longer than any civilization yet recorded, it is not greenhouse gas free, as advertised. Nuclear fuel is made with uranium, an ore that has to be mined, milled, refined, and shipped, each step requiring fossil energy inputs, and the rarer any extracted material becomes, the more energy intensive the extraction process becomes along with it. Studies conducted in Europe showed that nuclear electricity has a greenhouse footprint similar

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to combined-fuel generators, and as uranium become rarer, that footprint will become bigger. Uranium, the fuel base of nuclear power, must be mined, milled, converted, enriched, packaged, sent to reactors and split to produce the heat and steam that generate electricity. The uranium enrichment process in particular, in which the radioactive material is made more radioactive, generates greenhouse gases galore. It requires a tremendous amount of electricity, explains Elizabeth Stuckle, a spokeswoman at the US Enrichment Corporation, the company in charge of altering the uranium for the reactors. To get that electricity, she says, we are having to rely on fossil fuels. -Mark Francis Cohen, Nuking the Atmosphere Even the fiscally conservative Cato Institute notes that nuclear energy is also heavily subsidized and could not survive in a free market. (I am not promoting a free market. Quite the contrary.) Nuclear is not safe, it is not clean, and it is not cheap. It is the most expensive energy on the grid, except to the subsidized corporations who sell it. And a spent fuel fire or a reactor meltdown could have unbelievably catastrophic consequences. To power the whole world with nuclear electricity would require more than 500 reactors that would age and deteriorate in ultimately unpredictable social, economic, and political circumstances. Not the least of these concerns is that nuclear reactors may become asymmetric military targets predeployed radiological weapons waiting for activation by an enemy, as Gordon Thompson has called them as the Energy War makes the metaphorical global battlefield of the Bush administration a reality. At this juncture, partly for thermodynamic reasons and partly for economic ones, solar (photovoltaic) panels on aggregate, over time, worldwide have not produced a single watt-hour of electricity. For the time being, photovoltaics are a net energy sink. Photovoltaics can be improved, and theoretically they can be developed and used in a manner that gains energy, but this will require many more years and billions of dollars in research and development to begin gaining energy from photovoltaics. Right now, there is more energy expended in aggregate production of the panels than those panels ever produce. Moreover, their power delivery is extremely limited and they cannot complete with conventional electricity. And while photovoltaics may be made more efficient over time, they still have one other material constraint, and that is the increasing scarcity of silicon. Finally, geography and climate constrain the universality of a solar solution. Sixty square miles of solid solar cells would theoretically be required to power Oregon. If it rains, everyone suddenly has cold showers and their food rots. Similar problems are obviously associated with wind, waves, waterfalls, and geothermal. They are all geographically fixed and cannot produce more than a small fraction of the energy currently in use and inextricably bound up with the economic viability of the existing socio-political system. That brings us to hydrogen. The caustic Don Lancaster says, It is reasonable to expect that hydrogen is probably going to play a big role in future transportation and energy developments. Hydrogen can make a great student paper or a nice research topic. And eventually might 34

lead to a technical buck or two At the same time, there is sure a lot of hogwash and misinformation out there. Especially on the web. So, the more you know about real hydrogen resources, the more intelligently you can dismiss all the rest of them. Hydrogen is not really a fuel, but an energy carrier and therefore an energy sink. Most commercial hydrogen is produced by reforming methane, not through electrolysis, as many hydrogen-acolytes want to do for the hydrogen car. The process of either reforming methane or producing hydrogen through electrolysis is both expensive and energy-intensive. In fact, pre-existing energy is required more energy than can then be produced by the combustion of the hydrogen. Lancaster compares it to trading a US dollar for one Mexican peso. That is actually about right until the dollar tanks. Hydrogen cannot be produced by any means on earth that does not consume more energy than it delivers. And while the immensely expensive and energy inefficient hydrogen has around 39,000 watt-hours of (carried) energy per kilogram, compared to gasolines 13,000, the hydrogen can only deliver 3.5 watts per hour per liter. Hydrogen, if inefficiently burned, actually produces nitrogen oxides, which contribute to asthma attacks, ozone alerts, and acid rain. It also embrittles metals and diffuses through all non-metals. The fact of the matter is, contrary to all the utopian fantasies that are being propagated by charlatans and consumed by people who dont understand the science, there is not now nor will there ever be a hydrogen economy. It is the modern equivalent of alchemy. The Bush administration is pushing this right now, with the hidden agenda of producing it, using hydrolysis with nuclear electricity; a rather backhanded way to push their agenda on behalf of their nuclear utility clients. The unpalatable truth, which must be faced squarely if we are to be the least bit serious about energy, is that (1) there is no alternative to fossil fuel, and (2) it will take many years more dependency on fossil fuel to effectively transform our energy paradigm into anything that approaches sustainable. Youngquist and others estimate that full exploitation of all alternatives, even after extensive research and development to which there has been no meaningful political commitment, could not replace more than 30% of fossil fuels, and that is a net figure that does not take into account diversity of use, geographic constraints, or the fossil inputs that will be required to retool and restructure the whole world for an new energy regime. This is about as pleasant to say and hear as, That leg is gangrenous, and if we dont cut it off, you will die. It is also just as true and important. Even so-called alternatives would require substantial fossil fuel inputs not to mention a political will not yet on the horizon to develop. We are stuck with hydrocarbons, and they will be running out sooner than later. This exceedingly bad news does not win huge numbers of devotees, it doesnt make for a great grant proposal, and it doesnt sell anyones political newsletters. No one wants to hear that the party is almost over. Our system is a world system, and there is no way to realistically assess energy issues in any other context. Since we are examining energy use worldwide, we have to pay particular attention to the most populous nation on the planet, China. As this is written, China has been for several years now the fastest growing economy in the world. This is not solely a function of population. China is developing its industrial base, to include its research and development capacity at an unprecedented rate. Its domestic oil production peaked in the mid-1990s and is now in permanent decline, even as energy needs increase with its phenomenal growth. In 1995, Chinas energy 35

consumption was 16,662 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day. By 2005, it is projected to be 32,776, and by 2015, on that same trendline, it will be 64,475. This is just one example of the emerging conflict over finite global energy supplies. It is in the examination of the global conjuncture that we have to more fully integrate the question of energy with that of geopolitics, because it is here where we can see how energy as a long-term secular trend figures into a massively destabilized world system that has been left since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The USSR was a developmental state, just as present-day India and China are. That is, the single most central priority of the state was economic development. But the USSR was distinct from China and India inasmuch as it had an overwhelmingly determinative role in the global system during the Cold War, while China and India today are merely articulated within a system in which the United States plays the single most politically determinative role. In many respects, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States defined the 20th Century. Many historians speculate that had it not been for the USSR, there would have been three, four, or more world wars between the industrialized capitalist metropoles, but the US-USSR standoff, renegotiated during WWII for reasons this article will not dwell on, created a bipolar world that served as the impetus for the development of free-world multilateralism. When that system collapsed with the USSR in 1991, the raison detre of multilateralism collapsed with it, and the suddenness of that shift the equivalent of a Richter-8 geopolitical earthquake caught the whole world unawares, including the former adversaries of the Soviet Union, like the United States. The factor of the Soviet Union in the international equation had given credence to an illusion of autarkic national-industrial development that impacted even on the thought processes of US-aligned states like Japan and Germany. I will leave the detailing of this immense post-Soviet disequilibrium to historians and political scientists. Suffice it to say the repositioning scramble was on. The financial and military dominance of the world system dropped into the lap of the United States, just as it was becoming clear even to the most obtuse among the powerful that the earths very resource base was drying up. They know that there is grave danger to both the bioshpere and the world energy system, and that growth uses up these resources. In response, using the International Monetary Fund combined with selective applications of military power, crisis-stricken economies in the global South have been plunged into deeper and deeper misery. They cannot be permitted by the US continue on the path of growth, because, as Hornborg shows, it is a zero-sum game. Review any of the documents produced by the think tanks from where the current administration has drawn most of its cabinet, and they are extremely frank and explicit about their goals. The conquest and control of Southwest Asia is their absolute highest priority, and has been for almost a decade, precisely because over 50% of the world remaining easily extractible oil is there. Aggregate world oil production is peaking right about now. Gulf States' production, with Saudi Arabia being the greatest producer, will peak around 8-10 years later, around 2010-2012. If you do the math, it means that everyone except the Gulf States is already peaked or in decline. Best predictions for the end of recoverable oil are between 50 and 100 years, with the most neutral folk predicting 2070 or so. But as it winds down, which according to the Hubbert Curve begins almost immediately, there are a series of crises that will occur. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's 36

left is more than an economic competition. When we run out of a commodity like shirts, we can make more shirts. Oil is not a mere commodity. When you run out of oil, you're out. You've got to die and come back in 2 billion years to get it back. This is the diminishing lifeblood of the global economy. That is why there is an attempt afoot to resolve this situation in favor of US economic interests by military means. Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration was telling us quite openly they were planning to do before Iraq turned into a military swamp, has put a lot of backs against the wall. Terror attacks are already multiplying in the region, and regimes that are perceived to be in the US camp are facing the not totally unjustified perception that they are Quislings of the US. As standards of living in those nations fall, given the passing of Arab nationalism, the Islamist appeal to large masses of people has increased. The war in Iraq is first and foremost an energy war, which could evolve into a new kind of world war. In fact, it is likely that this is happening right now. World oil consumption right now is around 77 million barrels a day. By 2010, that is expected to increase to 100 million barrels a day. This oil is produced by two major groups, let's say, for the purpose of analysis. OPEC and non-OPEC (NOPEC). OPEC is largely concentrated in the Gulf region. NOPEC is the North Atlantic, Russia, North America, Mexico, China, Nigeria, and so forth. That doesn't tell the whole story, though. Gulf States' oil does not peak in production until 2010, and half the world's remaining accessible oil is there. World production is peaking right now, but world production is an average. NOPEC peaked several years ago, now being in permanent decline. So, OPEC is getting stronger, and NOPEC is getting weaker. Saudi Arabia an OPEC nation is the biggest pool, with Iraq second. The US has for years been trying to ensure domination of OPEC, and they have accomplished that to some degree, by ensuring the corrupt Saudis and others invest heavily in US financial instruments. Given that OPEC production is still rising, and NOPEC is in a permanent free fall, OPEC is inevitably regaining dominance over the overall oil market. Iraq is the best potential swing producer outside of Saudi Arabia, and therefore the best potential stalking horse within a newly reconfigured OPEC. Since world oil production begins to decline on average almost immediately, the US as the biggest end user needs to figure out how to compensate for the losses being sustained in NOPEC production. Their solution, now in its first stage with the occupation of Iraq, is to gain political control over the region. But the most optimistic scenarios are that all regional producers combined, with massive investment (over $1.5 trillion, a number that is daily rising with Iraqi armed resistance) in new infrastructure, might put out an additional 15 million barrels a day. Given that our extrapolated appetite will go up 25 million barrels a day within nine years, the US remains in a dilemma. In fact, the US has been trying to structure this post-WWII space for quite some time, and the bare fact is, it's an over-reach. It can't do it, and it can't not try. The only option now, from the point of view of the Bush administration, is to wage the infinite war, a war of extermination against 100 million Islamic people in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. It is a war fought not to grab a huge new untapped and undefended asset, but a declining one. The soon-to-be-decaying oil fields of the Middle East embedded in a sullen ocean of mass anger are no great prize upon which to build the next wave of capitalist accumulation. 37

-Mark Jones The people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining oil reserves are being unpredictably destabilized, and the US loss of access to critical energy supplies is now at least within the realm of possibility. Pakistan has been destabilized even as it continues to be in a nuclear standoff with its neighbor, India. Russia grows more hostile to US foreign policy by the day. Anti-American sentiment around the world is the strongest in living memory. Between 1945 and 1990, the US intervened militarily on 52 occasions. Between 1990 and 2000, it intervened 60 times. As we progressed through that decade, the US has begun to more and more organize these adventures without UN approval or oversight. Our government has refused to ratify the land mine convention, and is now abrogated the Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Accord. This drive to achieve independence of military action has now culminated with the grant of the broadest and most ill-defined war powers of any president in history to George W. Bush, with which he has managed to establish a situation that is, paradoxically, degrading the very institution upon which he most desperately depends to see his agenda through: the military. If we want to know what the energy crisis looks like, look around. This is it. If we want to know the logically simple but socially very difficult solution, it is conservation. Conservation is not conservative, but something that can only be accomplished through a revolutionary change in society. Whether we can accomplish the social transformation necessary is one issue, but the fact is that an energy soft-landing will require us to dramatically conserve dwindling fossil fuel stocks, by as much as 75%, and begin to think seriously about how to de-link from the growth economy forever. The Transportation Bombing (Written July 9, 2005 in response to the London subway bombings) Right or left, how can one ignore a set of well-planned, coordinated attacks against the transportation infrastructure of a city that, along with Tel Aviv perhaps, has taken more security precautions against bombings than any metropolis in the world? Nearly everything we have read over the last week has three common parts: a ritual denunciation of the bombers, an expression of sympathy for the victims, and a very circumspect analysis of some sort. If we are reading something from the left, the fourth part will be a comparison of the London casualties to the casualties of Anglo-American state terrorism. If we are reading something from the right, that fourth item will be a brave admonition not to back down in the face of terror. Bold agendas and timid analyses are the twin characteristics that seem to unite both right and left commentary at this point. So I want to try something different. I want to analyze an agenda, in a recklessly hypothetical way knowing full well that in a short time I could be proven enormously wrong by the emergence of unsupportive facts. I want to examine the hypothetical agenda of Osama bin Laden, using gender as my point of departure. I think he has mastered a uniquely effective international art of war, which I will call phallic judo. 38

There are two reasons we ignore gender in most of our analyses of international relations, particularly war. One, most of the people commenting on wars and on international relations are men, and we tend to be perfectly content to let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to our own cultural privileges and political power within the gender order. Two, the best way to avoid the topic of gender as a system of social power is to treat it as if were inevitable, because that which is inevitable merits no deeper reflection. But the whole question of militarism either as policy or a weltanschauung is a room occupied by an elephant we can ill afford to ignore and that elephant is the hegemonic masculinity of American militarism. Stephen Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, said during an interview in May 2005: In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto ones opponent especially important. This femiphobia this male fear of being feminine operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism. Ducat is correct, in my view, but in order to understand how the Bush administration like others before it is being defeated by opponents using the weight of this American military masculinity in political leadership, we have to draw a very sharp distinction between the variant of Wahabbi Islam incorporated into Osama bin Ladens political project, and the variant of martial masculinity that drives Karl Rove to portray George W. Bushs tenure as a Sylvester Stallone presidency. The gender categories of the Wahabbists have not yet been destabilized by an open, decades-long struggle by women for social and political power. Bin Laden, whose agenda is to seize control of Saudi Arabia, is operating out of a milieu in which this masculinity is not anxious, and therefore not in constant need of reassertion in the loud and insecure ways of destabilized American masculinity. Relieved, in a sense, of the need to engage in banty rooster displays of ritual aggression as part of his political theater, bin Laden finds himself in a position to use precisely that need on the part of the Bush administration against it. Like the sport of judo, where one seeks to break the balance of ones opponent, then to convert the strength of the opponent into ones own momentum, bin Laden has so far been very adept at using the aggression of the United States to trap it militarily and diplomatically. The actual form taken by the Bush agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq has been shaped in no small part by the hyper-masculinized dialectic between Bush and his popular base. The key to this imbalance is the US military occupation of Iraq. Bin Ladens agenda has never been a secret. The Anglo-American media has been immeasurably complicit in concealing that agenda from those who still rely on CNN and 39

the BBC for their window on the world; yet even the most superficial research reveals that bin Laden has always had as his political target his own country of origin Saudi Arabia. Given the regional and global strategic centrality of Saudi Arabia, it makes perfect sense from the point of view of bin Laden to break his key regional and global enemies as an inevitable first step on the long march to political power over the Kingdom. Considering that two of bin Ladens most reviled foes were Saddam Hussein and the United States, we can assess the situation in Iraq at the moment from a more instrumental perspective than the Bush-Blair passion play of good-versus-evil. Saddam is in prison; Iraq is in tatters and unlikely to ever become a regional power again, and the United States is mired down in an evermore Somalia-like, multi-factional civil war (of its own making) that is rapidly becoming a domestic political liability. What is there about this circumstance that might distress Osama bin Laden? For all Bushs prevarications attempting to associate bin Laden with Saddam as the premise for repeatedly referring to Iraq as the main front in the war on terror, one must assume that the real bin Laden is ecstatic with the US occupation of Iraq and hopes it will go on for quite some time. Sir Ivor Roberts, UKs ambassador to Italy recently referred to George W. Bush as al Qaedas best recruiting sergeant. If this is accurate, and I believe it is, then the Bush-Blair governments were not the only people afflicted with a growing sense of alarm at the British and American populations increasingly surly impatience with the Iraq occupation. Bin Laden will not want to see the occupation end either, and what better way to inject renewed energy into the military folly in Iraq than to push the old masculinity button again that one that reflexively says, We cannot back down. I dont say that the London bombings were planned by bin Laden, but the al Qaeda movement and it is a diffuse movement, not an organization certainly seems to have ways to signal itself, even to give the green light to certain kinds of operations against certain particular targets. As long as I am being this speculative then I will say that this particular operation was not the work of some independent cell of leaderless resistance, but a well-favored and highly competent group with pretty substantial funding. With that kind of support generally comes a powerful degree of strategic accountability to some central staff somewhere. I have speculated before, and seen nothing so far that would disabuse me of my hypothesis, that the World Trade Center-Pentagon attacks were symbolically constructed, but instrumentally designed to provoke a reaction. Given the most predictable emotional response of white male American culture always in the thrall of cultural icons like Rambo and Dirty Harry and given that the actual white males who reactively exhibit this mentality as a manifestation of their own gender anxieties are a substantial part of the Bush Base, there was never any doubt that (1) Afghanistan would be invaded (bin Laden probably knew from his Pakistani intelligence contacts that this operation was already planned) and (2) that the administration whose ideological architects had already written on the subject at some length would follow on with an invasion of Iraq. When Bush finally emerged on September 11, 2001, after having crafted an appropriately manly message for the occasion, he announced, Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.

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This is the masculinity that cannot admit of doubt, of ambiguity, of deliberation, and it must be framed in binaries. The reference to freedom was juxtaposed against those who hate freedom (for what reason we are not invited to ask), and male is juxtaposed to female in the coded language of courage and cowardice analogs for male and female. When an American comedian dared to suggest on television that intentionally committing suicide as an operational necessity was hardly an act of cowardice, his show was cancelled. The mere suggestion of courage synonymous in the semiotic universe of George W. Bushs base with male, and therefore fully human was met with howls of outrage, I believe, because this obvious point undermined one of the most essential propaganda tasks of American society at war: the feminization of the enemy. When Bushs phrasemongers pen bold missives like, I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch, and combine that with the dissemination of images on the ranch, cutting wood with a chainsaw, they are creating the image of the strong white father with all its cultural and emotional resonance. Some of my friends on the left will have at me for this riff on psychology, claiming it abandons philosophical materialism. Such mechanical thinking is one of the main reasons we have failed to regain any semblance of ideological hegemony even among wage workers and the oppressed. The right has long understood the power of the emotionally resonant symbol to assert itself in our material lives. And nothing is so emotionally engraved on our psyches, at every formative stage in our lives, as gender. Human beings relation to the material world is, after all, mediated by a system of meanings. This is the paradox of phallic judo, that an earlier construction of gender and one not yet destabilized by history that of the Wahabbist, is thrown onto the historical stage with the anxious masculinity of a militarized America as a military advantage. We are discovering the actual contradictions of late imperialism now, and one of the most remarkable of all is that a pre-feudal, Bedouin gender order that was nurtured and protected from modernism in the heart of a US vassal state Saudi Arabia with its pastoral masculinity that emphasizes guile and patience, now may stand as a superior antagonist against the loud, disembedded, and performative post-modern masculinity of 21st Century America. The latter is fundamentally predicated on the most post-modern of assumptions: that the narrative trumps the reality. That narrative is the brash triumphalism of the momentary and illusory victory the high-five dick-thing camaraderie strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier dressed up like a fighter pilot (Im not a fighter pilot, but I play one on TV.); the rich white-boy playing at boyz-in-the-hood bravado with remarks like, Bring em on. Abu Ghraib created a crisis for the administration precisely because it turned such a bright light on feminization of the enemy, and because everyone knew it. Hardly a person in the United States or Great Britain failed to understand how the sexual humiliation and plain dominant-top sexual abuse was tangled up in visions of revenge for the guards who participated in it even when the tops were imperial women feminizing enemy men. Prison, after all and Charles Graner was a veteran prison guard from his civilian life is where we see most starkly how biological gender can be dissociated from the

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masculine-feminine binary, and the bitch is always on the bottom, always penetrated (a common military term) in the construction of masculinity as domination. There was a kind of ritual denunciation of the London bombers by one and all. During the Abu Ghraib scandal and as part of the subsequent cover-up politician and pundit alike had to express their outrage with an appropriate ration of crocodile tears. The gendered-ness of the occupation was caught walking around with its fly open. There were two images that predominated on the airwaves on September 11, and only one of them was the perverse and hypnotic repetition of the aircraft crashing into the buildings and the billowing erasure of the Manhattan skyline (controlled, uniform, and repeated). The other was the authoritative father. He was everywhere, in every guise, not only embodied in George W. Bush, but in a plethora of newly anointed terrorism experts, and in the suddenly ubiquitous dick-thing posturing by male politicians and reporters with variously processed hair. It was as if the whole nation was being converted into a male revenge-fantasy film, wherein a state of emergency obliges the women and children (including those men who are feminized and infantilized) to cringe into the background, while the martial Reichian warrior-father transcends conventions in order to unleash his pure supra-rational masculine energy on the evildoers. The nation became the family, and its preservation depended upon the restoration of absolute authority to the white father. We were rebooted by the crashing buildings returned to a gender default. Ann Kibbey, in the February 2003 edition of Genders, writing about the Iraq War political climate in the US, pointed out how effectively the Bush handlers were already using the mythic American signifier of the Western film genre. Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric from Bush's Wanted Dead or Alive Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell's insistence that time is running out as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the Showdown or Standoff with Iraq. The evocation of the Western and all its prejudices now infuses U.S. culture and underwrites U.S. militarism. It seems that Bush, initially distinctive for his inarticulateness and stupidity, has succeeded in forcing (and enforcing) that same inarticulateness and stupidity on the U.S. public. People were stunned when Bush patronizingly dismissed the massive anti-war demonstrations in his Father Knows Best speech on the following Monday, but that's consistent with the gender ideology of the Western. As we ought to be aware, the ideology of gender and the ideology of genocidal violence are intertwined in the Western. The parallel action that typifies the conclusion of the Western (and other U.S. action movies) has generally been characterized only by its racist polarization of populations, which creates an artificial binary opposition that is resolved through the physical annihilation of one side by the other. But there is another dimension to it: The polarization of gender roles that is intertwined with it. What Americans seem slow to realize is the repugnant role in which they have now been cast, that of the female victim who must be rescued and saved by the male hero, a female victim whose role is to be helpless, mute, 42

and passive, immobilized by fear as she awaits the outcome of the chase. Such rescues are in no way about social justice. They are artificial tempo tasks (Sergei Eisenstein's wonderful phrase). She is referring to a task that becomes so urgent (the war on terror) that it trumps all the ethical concerns of peacetime. Time is running out, so we dont have time for all this quibbling with Father. We all become a collective woman now, and we all have to stand by our man. September 11, 2001 became a national tempo task, and there has been a concerted effort ever since to maintain that sense as the precondition for retaining the energetic support of the Bush administrations popular base among white men for whom this narrative resonates best. Shoot first; ask questions later. It is in some strange way the antithesis of realpolitik, inasmuch as the image has come to mean more than the reality. And so there is that urgency, that tendency to dive in, to show neither doubt nor hesitation (unmanly reactions) a tendency based fundamentally on the aggressive anxiety of the post-modern American male faced with the disequilibrium of gender. It is this reckless masculinity that has been such a boon for bin Laden, who is surely delighted that Blair and Bush stood together in the wake of the London bombings and promised not to back down. Their transference to bin Laden and others of their own conception of the gendered world has blinded them to the reality that they are responding to his initiative, in the way expected of them by their most energetic popular base dangerously frightened white men.

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The Global Battlefield (Originally published at From The Wilderness, July 2005) Money and Mediocrity General purpose money is what allows people to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola. -Alf Hornborg Its also what allows some of the most mediocre political and military intellects in the last century (and that is a highly competitive claim) to create one of the most dangerous and decisive historical conjunctures we may ever witness and hopefully survive. It appeared in the most arcane of headlines, this desperate new phase in the empire that had been gestating in the tense womb of the Pentagon-White House nexus. US military rethinking the two-war strategy It wasnt actually the military as a whole reconsidering anything, we found upon reading the article. This is a leak from high-level Pentagon insiders to the press, and more than one insider. There was an artful rebellion taking place among generals. The first line of the article read: The U.S. military, under stress from fighting in Iraq and protecting America from terrorism, is debating whether it can remain ready to fight two big wars at once, according to defense officials. Further along, we find out that the civilian and military officials, who asked not to be identified, confirmed a report in Tuesday's New York Times that top Defense Department planners were challenging longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at once. Officials, plural. If the leak were a felony, like the Plame case, this would add conspiracy to the charge. So what was going on, and why did this leak come at the same time that the Department of Defense published its strange and alarming Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support? To answer that rhetorical question, we have to go to the strategy document itself. Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., June 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support. From the Executive Summary: We now confront an enemy who will attempt to engage us not only far from US shores, but also at home. Terrorists will seek to employ asymmetric means to penetrate our defenses and exploit the openness of our society to their advantage. By attacking our citizens, our economic institutions, our physical infrastructure, and our social fabric, they seek to destroy American democracy. We dare not underestimate the devastation that terrorists seek to bring to Americans at home. To defeat 21st Century threats, we must think and act innovatively. Our adversaries consider US territory an integral part of a global theater of combat. We must therefore have a strategy that applies to the domestic 44

context the key principles that are driving the transformation of US power projection and joint expeditionary warfare. Each section of this ten-year strategy outline for the Department of Defense was headed by an italicized quote from Reich Fuehrer Bush. This is what must be borne in mind as part of any analysis of this document, which was scaring the bejeezuz out of a lot of civil libertarians. Because it was and I will describe exactly how as we go along a roadmap to martial law. But it was also the outline of a strategy of abject failure. It was a strategy so ambitious, so insanely grandiose, and so interdependently complicated in any attempt to put it into practice, that time, expense, and mind-boggling complexity at every scale would render the reality a ragged effigy of its own feverish ideal. It was, in short, a document prepared by ambitious bureaucratic functionaries to please two people who could give them what they wanted advancement at any cost. There could not be any doubt, after studying this so-called strategy document that the content was developed by the metrics-worshipping sycophants of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld himself added the cartoon-like Bush quotes as a series of kisses planted firmly on his bosss ass. Bear in mind, again, that while it is hard to underestimate the intelligence of these two powerful mooncalves, it is hard to overestimate the danger they present with control over the most expensive military apparatus in history. That is why the generals were leaking. The Bush administration spent money. Just as money can trade rain forests for Coke, money can buy expertise. But military expertise isnt what had gotten them this far. On the contrary, they had already secured their places in history as the leaders of the most powerful military in the world that was heading to being defeated by a stateless insurgency. Lebanonization In April 2005, Pepe Escobar, writing for Asia Times, called the degeneration of the tactical situation for the Anglo-American occupation Iraqs Lebanonization a reference to the 80s when Israeli aggression around the region catalyzed the transformation of Beirut into an apocalyptic street-war of multiple and shifting armed factions. With the new constituent assembly still engaged in a monumental struggle behind the scenes over three key issues the form of federalism, the fate of Kirkuk, and the disposition of Iraqs oil industry each of these factions was backed by armed militias. The Kurds commanded the largest militia, and the second largest armed organization in Iraq, the 80,000-strong peshmerga. The Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution (SCIRI), which dominated the constituent assembly, had fielded thousands of former Badr Brigade members, who also predominated in many of the official Iraqi armed forces and police. The Iranian-controlled Dawa Party had organized a militia as counterweight to these two large ones. Muqtada al Sadr still controlled a very substantial militia that operated almost as a government in many parts of Baghdad and Najaf. And the Iraqi Patriotic Alliance (IPA) the dominant and most well organized element within the guerrilla resistance operated in many areas throughout Anbar with strong popular support. Islamist fighters, largely from Saudi Arabia, had infiltrated Iraq and engaged in multiple actions, including firefights with the IPA. 45

The territorial division of these armed elements has minimized conflict between them to some extent, but the question of regional or ethnic federalism was far from resolved, and many of these armed actors were leaning forward in anticipation of politics by other means. Kirkuk had become a tinderbox of contention meanwhile, with the widening Kurd-Arab current of conflict creating a kind of political quicksand for the constituent assembly. On July 7, 2005, Iranian Defense Minister Admiral Ali Shamkhani announced an agreement between himself and Iraqi counterpart Saadoun al-Dulaimi, on a joint Iran-Iraq military cooperation agreement which surely dismayed Abazaid and Rumsfeld. Bush, it was reported, does not read his messages, and is a dont worry, be happy kind of guy. Just days earlier, another journalist critical of the US, Yasser Salihee working for Knight-Ridder was killed by a single bullet to the head, apparently fired by a US sniper, while he was halted at a US roadblock near his home. Salihee was researching ever more frequent reports of US-trained Iraqi paramilitaries who were engaging in death-squad style activities against anyone suspected of opposing the occupation. Less than a week later, 44year-old Cyrus Kar an American journalist and Navy veteran working on a documentary film in Iraq was imprisoned by US occupation forces on suspicion of insurgent activity. This was in the wake of The Guardians release of a story that led with: Secret torture chambers, the brutal interrogation of prisoners, murders by paramilitaries with links to powerful ministries... Foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont in Baghdad uncovers a grim trail of abuse carried out by forces loyal to the new Iraqi government. Lebanonization was proceeding nicely, and its complexity, as in both Somalia and Lebanon, spelled big trouble for US forces there. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan the first of two second-rate actors to have been Governor of California ordered a military intervention and occupation in Lebanon. Within weeks, some of his own closest advisors, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, were telling him that this was a situation ripe for disaster, and that the US forces needed to be withdrawn as soon as possible. Reagan responded more positively, however, to someone whose grasp of global politics was as limited as his own, and whose worldview was heavily informed by a kind of Billy Badass, big-dick machismo former Secretary of State and then-National Security Advisor Alexander Haig. Haig counseled Reagan that US credibility involved sticking to its guns, and Reagan himself a veteran of several cinematic Westerns determined to stay the course. Within a year, the Marine outposts in Lebanon had become embroiled in the civil war, often trading shots with opponents they could not identify. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Vessey joined his voice to that of Weinberger, and advised Reagan that he was slipping into a Vietnam-like conundrum. Another officer, a young up-and-coming colonel working as Weinbergers primary military advisor, also cautioned withdrawal. His name was Colin Powell. On October 23, 1983, a mammoth truck bomb exploded in a Marine compound at the Beirut Airport, killing 241 American troops and wounding more than 100 others. That was when Americans began to ask in earnest, what exactly are we doing there? In this case, the ludicrous notion of building democracy would have choked the public. 46

Powell would write later in his memoirs, America [was] sticking its hand into a thousand-year-old hornets nest with the expectation that our presence would pacify the hornets. In February 1984, Reagan announced the withdrawal from Lebanon, saying, Were not bugging out; were just going to a little more defensible position [the ships sitting off the shores of Lebanon]. No doubt Reagan coached Donald Rumsfeld, then his envoy to the Middle East, on how to mangle the English language in the service of obfuscation. Powell, it seems, still intuits trouble well (like any successful bureaucrat), maintains his Orientalist ignorance of political history, and is willing to shut up and take orders to oversee disastrous lies. He will be remembered by history as a man who gave good advice based on bad but fortuitous logic, and who got paid well for being an obedient house negro. Global Battlespace I said earlier that the Bush administration had not solely invested appropriated revenues in military expertise. In fact, the real political investment which is brilliant in the same sort of sociopathic way Karl Rove is said to be brilliant has been in legal advice. Money buys space and time. Money buys scientists who lie about climate change and tobacco. Money also buys a great battle-staff of lawyers. Look not to Iraq to understand this, but to Cuba. The Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba has long served as an offshore prison. More recently it has become a legal testing ground for the legal doctrine that underpins the Bush War Doctrine. With the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration accelerated its push to extend military power by pressing the limits of juridical precedent, and carrying these new, precedent-establishing cases before a series of courts, dominated by Republican appointed judges. Based on the notion that the entire world is now a metaphorical battlefield, in a War Against Terrorism, the administration has created a number of facts on the ground, then sought a judicial rubber stamp that will give these actions precedential power in the future expansion of their application. Over time, the metaphor of global battlefield has come to be treated by the administration and the obedient press as a literal and legally recognized reality. One case in this regard is the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. The other case is that of Jose Padilla, an American citizen detained without showing cause as an unlawful enemy combatant. The attempt to summarily try detainees on the presumption of guilt at Guantanamo Bay suffered a setback by a ruling in November 2004, when the plan for the prisoners to appear before a military tribunal was ruled illegal in a US court. The federal court held against the US government that there must be a process to determine whether detainees are entitled to protection as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. But the right to indefinitely detain without charge was not challenged by that ruling, and it is now known that several detainees were transferred to Guantanamo from countries in

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which the US is not engaged in hostilities definitely from Bosnia, and possibly even the United States. However, this ruling merely rejected the process that put prisoners before a military bench; it did not weigh in on the question of whether the President or his representatives can simply declare anyone an unlawful enemy combatant by fiat which is exactly what happened in the case of Jose Padilla a US citizen and what has happened with the detention of Guantanamo inmates from places outside the US so-called battlespaces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Padilla who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah Al Muhajir was detained in 2002 by the Department of Justice. On June 9th of that same year, Muhajir/Padilla was transferred from civilian control to the control of the military and incarcerated in a South Carolina navy brig. He has not been charged with any crime; the evidence the government had indicated it has is currently (as of September 2005) too weak to make a credible case; and he has been denied legal representation. This clear violation, using the military, of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, is obviously an attempt to push the envelope of legal precedent in order to employ surprise and indefinite detentions against anyone the executive branch determines is an enemy. The 5th Amendment states: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. It is not insignificant that the Bush administration is using the military to hold him out of the reach of civil law, because these actions in conjunction with the recently released Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, which explicitly lays out plans for a kind of partial-martial law in the event of any attack which effectively puts the military in control of the movements of the entire population of the United States. In effect, the Guantanamo and Padilla cases are designed to make actual martial law unnecessary, by introducing various measures under various precedents to produce a de facto state of martial law which is immune to a singular de jure remedy, that is, lifting the declared state of martial law. It is far harder to unravel a security-state legal apparatus that is composed of dozens of individual legal precedents than to mount an opposition to a declared state of emergency. Lets look at the background. Within a month of September 11th, the executive branch jumped completely over an acquiescent Congress with executive fiats that included establishing the following:

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A directive empowering the attorney general to authorize the indefinite detention of some non-citizens, a rule that could affect hundreds of individuals, according to the Justice Department. An order to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to carry out voluntary interviews of more than 5,000 mostly Middle Eastern men, ages 18 to 33, who are living in the US, ostensibly to gather information concerning future terrorist attacks. A new policy on visa applications affecting men, ages 16 to 45, from 25 Middle Eastern and African countries. All such applicants will face intense scrutiny and long delays in the processing of their requests. Their names will be checked against databases maintained by the FBI. The suspension of running tallies by the Justice Department of the number of people rounded up by law enforcement agencies in the antiterror dragnet. (WSWS, November 2001) The basis for this collection of discrete orders (as opposed to laws) is, in fact, the same basis that must be established to impose martial law it is just a matter of degree. This entire legal edifice is erected, however, on a very shaky foundation the state of national emergency. This state was actually enacted by an Executive Order on September 14, 2001, three days after the World Trade Center collapsed and at a point when the number of Congress members with enough sand left to resist the stampede could be counted on one hand. This Executive Order claims its authority from the National Emergencies Act (NEA)(50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) and section 301 of title 3, United States Code. The problem here is that the Executive Order cites the NEA as follows: By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, and in furtherance of the proclamation of September 14, 2001, Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks, which declared a national emergency by reason of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States, I hereby order as follows: One little glitch nothing in the NEA gives the President Constitutional authority to declare shit, if I may be short. You can pore over either document until the cows come home, and no such authority exists. Moreover, his proclamation of September 14 has all the legal validity of a Shakespeare sonnet. Only Congress is legally authorized to make such declarations. The Constitution does not authorize the President to unilaterally declare such emergencies, therefore it surely does not authorize him to impose any form of emergency measures to meet one. The reason this gross usurpation of Congressional authority happened was because Congress itself, with precious few exceptions, displayed the most craven and opportunistic cowardice in the face of this administration, and now they are as loathe as any neo-con loon to admit they screwed this one up. So this illegality stands to this day. But there is more

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According to United States Code, Title 50, Chapter 34, Sub-chapter II, Section 1622, once a state of emergency is declared (by the legal method), it must by law undergo a Congressional review and approval for any extension a minimum of every six months. Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated. This language is not ambiguous. Yet fiat-detention, as Executive Orders, are fundamentally predicated on an existing state of national emergency that has not been brought under review for a joint resolution of Congress since it was unilaterally declared. The basis for extension of military rule through precedent until now had been this thoroughly unchallenged state of national emergency, one which presumes without explanation that there is a state of war, with no clear definition of who the enemy is, and with the presumptive battleground conceivably covering every square inch of the earth. Two things gave the administration the green light for this abuse of power: (1) Congressional cowardice, and (2) failure of anyone to successfully challenge the notion of a global battlespace. The latter could become tougher as time goes on. Just as the specious claim that Iraq was harboring Islamist terrorists has been transformed into a reality by the actions of the United States, the provocations of the Bush administration based on the metaphor that the world is a battlefield could very well serve to make it into a frightening reality. And this administration knew it. Thats why the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support (SHDCS) began with the assumption that such an attack was inevitable within ten years. Integration The ride-em-cowboy military adventurism of the Reagan administration in Lebanon became an embarrassment, but they managed to leave without pulling down an entire system around them. Reagan went on to conduct its own illegal terror campaign against Nicaragua, evade prosecution for a host of felonies related to the Iran-Contra affair, rescue a wrecked US economy by conducting an IMF hold-up of Mexico, and bequeath its most criminally-inclined diplomatic reptiles to the current administration and still live to become a conservative icon. But the Bush administration was now affording many of the same ministerial malefactors from Rumsfeld to Negroponte a second opportunity to fail grandly; but this time they were working madly to ensure that all failures become systemic failures. It was alarming, true enough, but also fascinating to watch in the same way we are fascinated by the film of a parachutist whose canopy never opens. The key to this inevitable crash is something referred to dozens of times in the SHDCS as integration. Integration is a fetish that refers to the standardization of equipment and operational procedures across the boundaries of international law enforcement and military action, across the boundaries of federal, state, and local 50

authorities, and across the boundaries of military doctrine and police doctrine. This amounts to the conceptual simplification of numerous complex official-social systems, and an attempt to bring these systems more nearly under the singular control of the American executive branch. While the SHDCS nodded to flexibility and agility again and again, the general thrust of the strategy was to place that flexibility and agility in the hands of a tiny international general staff the US National Command Authority and this was the inevitably fatal contradiction. The whole notion of tactical agility, which Rumsfeld and his transformation predecessors had fallaciously cribbed from warfighting theorist John Boyd, is based on direct and concrete observation at every scale of battle. The Achilles heel of this entire concept is precisely in the realm of observation. The Bush administration blundered into its current Iraqi quagmire because of its insistence on perceptual conformity, and its unwavering tendency to seek evidence to support its own preconceptions. In Boyds theory of warfighting designed by the way for local combat and not national strategy all actions are taken in the context of a decision cycle, which begins with observation and orientation, and ends with decision-action. The decision-action then changes the dynamic of the battlespace, in unpredictable ways, whereupon one has to observe those changes in order to reorient for the next decision a cycle. The efficacy of action is directly related to the unbiased accuracy of observation and appropriateness of orientation. In other words, if the observation is faulty, the whole repeating decision cycle spirals down to disaster. Like the Iraqis greeting the American occupation as liberators. They believed that because that is what they wanted to believe. The Boyd cycle is most quickly undone when preconceptions and-or false expectations interfere with the accuracy of observation. Large bureaucratic organizations, like the US military, are categorically incapable of operating with this degree of inhering dynamism, because their size and complexity oblige them to operate within long-term strategies to maintain institutional stability. That is why they can only ultimately succeed by employing the principle of mass large forces with multiple and redundant capacities to absorb contingencies with which they cannot compete one a one-to-one level. In the SHDCS, among all the deadening bureau-chatter of integration, we find the most Orwellian notion of all expressed in that uniquely one-dimensional manner of the military (and certain socially adept psychopaths) as shared situational awareness, which is assigned its own acronym: SSA. Shared situational awareness is defined as a common perception of the environment and its implications. All domestic and foreign partners within the homeland defense mission space require situational awareness for three reasons: to identify threats as early and as distant from US borders as possible; to provide ample time for an optimal course of action; and to allow for a flexible operational response the US government continues to make great strides in overcoming obstacles to shared situational awareness. (page 23, SHDCS) No wonder the generals are afraid.

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One example given of how SSA has worked was how the American law enforcement community worked with its international counterparts to thwart international drug cartels and worldwide crime syndicates. Right. Today, transnational terrorists have blurred the traditional distinction between national security and international law enforcement. Together with the development of other security threats, this expanded national security challenge necessitates an unprecedented degree of shared situational awareness among Federal agencies, with state, local, tribal, and private entities, and between the United States and its key partners. (page 23, SHDCS) Integration is based on perception-integration. But perception-integration can easily become, in fact will become, a thoroughly mismatched perception and reality, and with that we enter the mismatch-spiral to breakdown. Having Your Cake and Eating it Too Excerpt from the SHDCS: The scope of DoDs role in preventing terrorist attacks within the USD land domain is defined by the Presidents constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and limited by statutory authority related to military support of civilian law enforcement. Domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function. (page 26) If circumstances warrant, the President and the Secretary of Defense may direct military forces and assets to intercept and defeat threats on US territory. When conducting land defense missions on US territory, DoD does so as a core, warfighting mission, fulfilling the Commander in Chiefs Constitutional obligation to defend the nation. (page 27) One can only wonder whether capitalization of Constitutional in the second claim and non-capitalization in the first are Freudian slips. This was not as clear-cut a contradiction as many distressed civil libertarians had claimed in their first startled reaction to this document. The administration was not yet trying to have its cake and eat it, too. It had just baked two cakes. The keywords were prevention and defense, and they were also monotonously repeated throughout the SHDCS. For the decisive transfer of power to the military on US soil, there had to have been at least the (perceived) presence of actual attackers. There were actually multiple interlocking strategies presented in this document: a National Security Strategy (euphemism for their more militarized foreign policy), a National Strategy for Homeland Defense (which falls under the Department of Homeland Security), a National Defense Strategy (which is a DoD responsibility to attack hypothetical enemies before they reach our shore), and the strategy outlined in the document under 52

review the SHDCS, which describes how the military will interact with other agencies inside the US, before and during an attack. What brought them all together conceptually was shared situational awareness, under the direction of the new intelligence tsar and former Reagan accomplice, John Negroponte. What brought them all together symbolically (and legally unless and until this concept is successfully challenged) was the global battlespace. What brought them all together operationally was the enhancement of executive authority asserted using the global battlespace premise, and secured through Congressional cowardice and opportunism. Congress could have reasserted itself any time to demand a review of the presidential declaration of a state of national emergency, and on very sound Constitutional grounds. It just didnt. Homeland defense was named as the responsibility of the DoD, but on page five of the SHDCS homeland defense was defined as protection of US sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical defense infrastructure against external threats or aggression, or other threats as directed by the President. (italics mine) What the SHDCS did that left the door open to transgress these jurisdictional boundaries was insert elastic clauses that will be left ultimately to the interpretation of Federal judges, who have now been largely appointed by Republicans. It stated that DoDs responsibility is to address external threats, then left remaining the clause, other threats as directed by the President, that must be interpreted after action is taken. While our eye is on the institutional demarcation between military and non-military, we might miss the consolidation of power to interpret before action is taken in the hands of the President, who is not only the Commander in Chief of the military, but the intelligence tsars (domestic and international) and Attorney Generals (domestic) boss. They have one cake. And they can eat another. But the cakes are poisonous. We have already briefly analyzed the situation in Iraq. The wholly pessimistic prognosis there seemed to be utterly ignored by the SHDCS, which bantered along in the tone-deaf language of Rumsfelds metric-entranced toadies, even mentioning the integral necessity of building and maintaining foreign bases in order to make this febrile dream work. Rumsfeld himself could read this analysis, and anything I write here would be absolutely lost on him. His inability to go beyond his own empiricism is a reflection of his own narcissism self-referential above all, grandiose, convinced of his infallibility even in the face of extraordinary evidence to the contrary, manipulative, incapable of genuine empathy. It works, because there is a match between personality and system here. He is the perfect Secretary of Defense, but he has come with an administration and an epoch that is transforming the offensive power of the United States military into the central instrument of imperial decline in its commitment to control the worlds remaining easily extractable energy supplies. Asymmetry On July 7th, 2005, we woke to the news of a coordinated attack against the transit system of London. The attacks coincided with a G-8 Summit meeting in Glasgow, the award of the 2012 Olympics to London, and a systematic attack against all foreign 53

diplomats in Baghdad. I do not mean to imply that there is some conspiratorial connection between these phenomena. The connections are emblematic of a trend, not a conspiracy. This attack happened in London, a metropolitan city that has long ago blurred the distinctions between military and police functions in its attempt to hang onto power in Northern Ireland, and a city already accustomed if anyone ever becomes accustomed to bombing as a method of asymmetric warfare. Over 40 people were killed and more than 700 wounded. The city screeched to a halt. Stocks fell around the world. Travelers insurance jumped. The US was put on a heightened state of alert. Emergency systems in London were strained to the limit. There were predictable expressions of shock and determination from Bush. Blair was visibly shaken. But a glance at the SHDCS showed that this was expected. That it happened in London was a bit off the script, because the clear expectation, written between every line of the SHDCS was that it would happen in the United States. The document was surprisingly honest about the vulnerabilities in the US, in fact mentioning for the first time which I had written about in December 2003 - how general aviation aircraft, light airplanes from private fields, could be employed as a poor-mans Cruise missile against nuclear or chemical plants. None of the goals for the imposition of domestic population control were met in the wake of September 11th. The miniscule American left stood up first and defied the administration within days, while the national blood was still burning with the desire for revenge, and that push-back by the US left was extremely significant in creating a space for doubt about official narratives, about the wisdom of accepting the Bush population control measures, about the characterization of the post-9-11 period as a crusade, and about the attempt to throw down a gauntlet that said, You are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This leftist push-back may have been the most significant political victory of progressive forces in the US in many years, and it created the conditions for a rapidly assembled and vital antiwar movement later. The with us, or with the terrorists language was reproduced in the SHDCS. Terrorists will try to shape and degrade American political will in order to diminish American resistance to terrorist ideologies and agendas. (Page 9) Ergo anyone who opposed this plan would be complicit in degrading American political will and therefore participating in a terrorist agenda. This is where they wanted to go after 9-11, but that part of their plan failed spectacularly. So they need that next attack, and they are on a policy trajectory that makes it a near certainty. Let me say here, for anyone inclined toward conspiracy theory, there is not the slightest need for the Bush administration to build its own terror attack. Its stubborn refusal to change course in Southwest Asia, its aggressive militarism around the world, and the unspeakable technological power of the US armed forces, all make an attack nearly inevitable. When no one anywhere can credibly face down such a powerful military head on, then they have no choice but to bend to the will of the US or fight back using asymmetric methods. As Ive pointed out before, with non-state actors, there is no effective mechanism for either disabling their parent institution (the state) or attempting to apply a kind of pointby-point revenge. Any actions now taken by the US military in response to any attack has a better chance of making more enemies than defeating some enemies. And as the SHDCS accurately states in somewhat more elliptical language, the US is a sprawling collection of 54

hundreds and hundreds of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the form of infrastructure, that are pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction waiting for anyone who is so inclined to activate them. Exposed water supplies, poorly protected research labs, toxic chemical plants (over a hundred near populations of a million or more), and 103 licensed nuclear power facilities. London today. Where tomorrow? Military power cannot prevent asymmetric attack; but it can increase its probability. In another example of the psychotically flat language of this document, these kinds of attacks were referred to in the SHDCS as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attacks (CBRNE), and the response to them which is discussed repeatedly and at length throughout this strategy is called CBRNE consequence management. I swear to readers that I did not make that up. Partial-Martial There was a plan within a SHDCS plan, as I stated earlier, to impose martial law that is not martial law. This is what aroused civil libertarian watchdogs, who rightly believe that the Bush administration would set up concentration camps for all of us if given half a chance. The fact that they dont, however, is an indication that they cant (at least for now) and the reason I find it personally impossible to fantasize yet about building escape tunnels under my house or emplacing food caches throughout the local pine-barrens. The statement that Terrorists will try to shape and degrade American political will in order to diminish American resistance to terrorist ideologies and agendas, as a bullet point in this military strategy overview certainly should give us pause, and it definitely supports the idea that this administration wanted to exercise that kind of population control. I have already outlined how they were laying the legal groundwork to go after political enemies. In the SHDCS, on more than one occasion, it stated, At the direction of the President or the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense executes military missions that dissuade, deter, and defeat attacks upon the United States, our population, and our critical defense infrastructure. This was interesting on two counts: (1) It gives the Secretary of Defense unprecedented power by using the conjunction or. (2) It says the military can be used inside the United States to protect itself (force protection) through the expansion of itself to include critical defense infrastructure. The document did not say At the direction of the President and the Secretary of Defense, which would indicate a chain of command and accountability, but At the direction of the President or the Secretary of Defense, which implied (a) that the Sec-Def could take it upon himself to make one of these momentous decisions, and (b) that if a decision were later scrutinized for who was responsible, the President could plausibly deny he had anything to do with it. Using these accountability cut-outs was one key way that Rumsfeld evaded any responsibility in the Abu Ghraib scandal. When he went before Congress, he surrounded himself with a phalanx of generals and bureaucrats, to whom he punted questions the answers to which might incriminate him in the future. As usual, the Ostrich Congress did not point out this transparent maneuver. 55

But it was also interesting in a third way. Congress was nowhere mentioned. Apparently the DoD already found itself in a position to assume that the war making powers formerly and exclusively assigned to Congress had now effectively passed exclusively to the executive branch. It seemed to be a fait accompli that the US could now go to war without any declaration of war, that it could claim a state of war as the basis for declaring the entire world a battlefield without a declaration of war, and that it could demand all the international rules and conventions relating to war apply to the US as protections but that these same rules and conventions would not apply to the US as they relate to US actions. The SHDCS did not accomplish the concentration of power in the hands of the Presidency. Congress abdicated its won power every day that it continued (and still continues) to allow this to go on. It was the combination of this concentration of fiat-power in the presidency and the redefinition of force protection for the military as including critical infrastructure that laid the foundation for a state of partial-martial law that effectively functions as martial law. Later in the same document, it stated, DoD will continue to transform military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the forward regions, approaches, US homeland, and global commons. Here they were explicitly stating that the military could and would operate inside the United States. Further along, The Department is also responsible for protecting DoD personnel located in US territory. This was fairly common sense and not alarming in and of itself. Of course, DoD would protect its own inside the US. But when the definition of force protection was expanded to include critical infrastructure, and force protection came to mean capability protection, the SHDCS then claimed the right to move on critical defense assets located at public or private sites beyond the direct control of DoD [that] could include elements of the Defense Industrial Base, which is a worldwide industrial complex with capabilities to perform research and development and design, produce, and maintain military weapons systems, subsystems, components, or parts to meet military requirements defense critical infrastructure could also include selected civil and commercial infrastructures that provide the power, communications, transportation, and other utilities that military forces and DoD support organizations rely on to meet their operational needs. In addition, the President or the Secretary of Defense might direct US military forces to protect non-DoD assets of national significance that are so vital to the nation that their incapacitation could have a debilitating effect on the security of the United States. It didnt take much imagination to figure out how broadly this could be interpreted. The ability to take over roads alone effectively puts the military in a position to completely control the population de facto if not de jure martial law. The strategy document claims that Defense contractors must be able to maintain adequate response times, ensure supply and labor availability, and provide direct logistic support in times of crisis. Ensure labor availability? How did they plan to do that, exactly?

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In the United States of America, where there are an average of four firearms per household, Donald Rumsfeld was going to form press-gangs of labor? This was the reason many of us were not building our tunnels and stocking canned food under tree roots. The reality of Full Spectrum Dominance, it was apparent when one looked below the surface of things, was actually Full Spectrum Delusion. The United States military could not even secure a military victory in Iraq, and this mad document from the Pentagon was talking about establishing martial law over 290 million armed people within a 9,631,418 square kilometer land mass. This is their plan? They were going to accomplish it with whom exactly? Did they honestly believe that American soldiers would impose this kind of control on US populations? Moreover, did they believe in any real mass casualty emergency that soldiers will stay buttoned quietly down in their posts while, for example, a radiological cloud leaking from a destroyed reactor wafts gently toward their families? Where would the money come from? The military was already driving the national debt and current account deficit through the stratosphere, and the war in Iraqs cost was being borne in larger and larger part by the real target of US international intrigue, China, who now owned $403 billion in US debt. Unless we were prepared to accept that everyone at the Pentagon, from Rumsfeld down, was clinically insane, we could not take this document seriously as a plan, but only as the basis for using an emergency as the pretext for rounding up and neutralizing their political opposition. This was the pretext for the selective application of partial-martial law. This was one concrete manifestation in the social relations of the Energy War. The Anonymous Generals This was not what most generals signed up to do. And while a significant number of them had evolved into the twisted bureaucratic creatures we saw in the guise of John Abazaid or Rumsfelds pet weasel, Mark Kimmett, many of these senior officers were watching Iraq with growing dismay, even as they had seen the development of this eerie little Metrics Novella of the Apocalypse being scratched and sniffed through its composition in the Pentagon. In February, 2003, Mike Davis wrote an essay called Slouching Toward Baghdad. Imperial Washington, like Berlin in the late 1930s, has become a psychedelic capital where one megalomaniacal hallucination succeeds another. Thus, in addition to creating a new geopolitical order in the Middle East, we are now told by the Pentagon's deepest thinkers that the invasion of Iraq will also inaugurate the most important revolution in military affairs (or RMA) in two hundred years." According to Admiral William Owen, a chief theorist of the revolution, the first Gulf War was not a new kind of war, but the last of the old ones. Likewise, the air wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan were only pale previews of the postmodern blitzkrieg that will be unleashed against the Baathist regime. Instead of old- fashioned sequential battles, we are promised nonlinear shock and awe.

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Although the news media will undoubtedly focus on the sci-fi gadgetry involved - thermobaric bombs, microwave weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), PackBot robots, Stryker fighting vehicles, and so on - the truly radical innovations (or so the war wonks claim) will be in the organization and, indeed, the very concept of the war. In the bizarre argot of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation (the nerve center of the revolution), a new kind of warfighting ecosystem known as network centric warfare (or NCW) is slouching toward Baghdad to be born. Promoted by military futurists as a minimalist form of warfare that spares lives by replacing attrition with precision, NCW may in fact be the inevitable road to nuclear war. Davis had put his finger on another reality that the more adroit among the Pentagon Admiralty understood. If the Rumsfeld doctrine continued to fail, as it was failing spectacularly in Iraq, how would the Untied States pursue its integrated long-term strategy, not to fight terrorists, but to encircle China, isolate Russia, and establish control through forward basing in strategically essential Southwest Asia? Rumsfeld had dismantled his pre-revolutionary military capacity, and taken his minimalist revolution in military affairs into a dangerous impasse, where the whole world was alert not to US strength, but that the giant was hopelessly entangled in Iraq, while China bid for Unocal and Latin America drifted away on the tectonic political plate of Bolivarianismo. Europe flirted with Russia, and China invested in the Caribbean. In the Persian Gulf, Persia itself Axis of Evil member Iran was emerging in the tortured realpolitik of US intervention as a new power center, and that same month signed a military cooperation pact with the (part) puppet government of occupied Iraq. Davis asked in his 2003 article just two months before the premature climax of Shock and Awe: But what if the RNA/NCWs Second Coming of Warfare doesnt arrive as punctually promised? What happens if the Iraqis or future enemies find ways to foil the swarming sensors, the night-visioned Special Forces, the little stair-climbing robots, the missile-armed drones? Indeed, what if some North Korean cyberwar squad (or, for that matter, a fifteen-year-old hacker in Des Moines) manages to crash the Pentagon's system of systems behind its battlespace panopticon? If the American war-fighting networks begin to unravel (as partially occurred in February 1991), the new paradigm -- with its just in time logistics and its small battlefield footprint -- leaves little backup in terms of traditional military reserves. This is one reason why the Rumsfeld Pentagon takes every opportunity to rattle its nuclear saber. In their own subdued roundabout manner of Washington intrigue, the generals leaked the story that the US had lost the capability to execute the so-called two-war doctrine. They may have only intuited the implications implications that went far, far beyond the concern they had for how Rumsfeld and his whiz-kids had ripped up and wasted the institution to which they devoted their entire lives.

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And they may have understood the implications of the SHDCS when it was placed in the context of this global impasse. If things were about to get much rougher internationally, then they had to prepare to get a lot rougher domestically. The US was not attempting to build an empire, but to salvage one in an emerging state of decay. And the strange collection of rulers running amok in the executive branch was not angling to integrate any defense of the people. It was building a rampaging nuclear terror state. On July 15, 2005, the former CEO of the worlds largest defense contractor, deputy defense secretary from 1994-1995, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (19951996), John Deutch, said, Those who argue that we should stay the course because an early withdrawal ... would hurt Americas global credibility must consider the possibility that we will fail in our objectives in Iraq and suffer an even worse loss of credibility down the road. Deutch, who called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, was echoing another imperialist with impeccable bona fides -- Zbigniew Brzezinski -- who had suggested the same thing only three weeks earlier, using the words incompetence and quagmire. These alarms sounded by some of the most hawkish representatives of Americas ruling class were perhaps the best indication that a crisis is stalking the empire. At the heart of that crisis is the head-on collision about to occur between capitalism and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Afterword to The Global Battlefield In the early portions of this monograph, I noted an artful rebellion among generals. With the subsequent call by Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, a hawkish ex-career Marine who enjoys close personal relationships with much of the Pentagon brass, to extract US military forces from Iraq, we see the advance of this rebellion. Murtha was saying for the generals what they could not safely say themselves. It is interesting to note that his concern was degradation of the military as an institution, not any moral revulsion at the cost of the war to Iraqis. It is further interesting to note that he called for a regional presence beyond the horizon that is, out of Iraq itself acknowledging in a manner the commitment of the whole US ruling class to controlling this region as an absolute necessity. Another point that should be re-emphasized here, purely for simplicity, is that we need not delve into the arcane business of Levi-Strauss modern Machiavellianism to unpack the definition of the so-called neo-cons. Their deepest commitment is synonymous with any garden variety liberal Democrat. Finding solutions to the crisis of capital accumulation in the coming historical period. What differentiates them, aside from the struggle for institutional dominance within the American body politic, is their belief that the key to rescuing capital accumulation and holding onto American global dominance within that accumulation regime is the militarization of both foreign and domestic policy. That is precisely what the SHDCS is about. When I wrote The Global Battlefield in July 2005 for From The Wilderness, Colin Powell was still Secretary of State. Now Powell has been replaced by his female counterpart, Condoleeza Rice not merely an African decoy for the white supremacist Republicans, but also a female decoy for an administration characterized by a lot of dress-up masculinity. Her own lack of any military experience is no doubt comforting for both Bush and Rumsfeld, and the behind-

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the-scenes bureaucratic tussle between Rumsfeld and Powell has obviously been resolved. There will be no talk of hornets in this White House. Not even behind closed doors. But as this is written (early April 2006), there are hornets aplenty, and when they sting, someone is bound to cry out. Just days ago, someone either the American spec-ops establishment or one of their Iraqi surrogates attacked Muqtada al Sadr. De rigeur, it was a sloppy attempt and failed, and consistent with every other action of the Bush administration in Iraq, it backfired politically. The March 26 mortar attack on Sadrs Najaf compound missed the cleric, wounding an adult and a child; and it was followed up in short order by a combined USIraqi Special Forces attack on the Sadrist Mustafa mosque in northeast Baghdad that witnesses say involved the massacre of at least 17 people. Hussein al-Tahan, the provisional governor of Baghdad summarily suspended all security cooperation between his government and US forces, pending an investigation. This is the second time US hostility to Sadr has raised the specter of a generalized Shia rebellion. This time, these politically disastrous attacks appear to be motivated by the US desire to rid itself of Daawa Party prime minister-elect Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who Muqtada al-Sadr supported in the latest election. Sadrs ability to emerge from every confrontation with the Americans as a more popular leader and a pivotal king-maker, it seems, had galled the US authorities quite enough. The compliant unity government envisioned by the every-self-delusional Americans had just been subjected to another assault when Jaafari without clearing his trip with the US Central Command took a trip to Turkey to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This in turn provoked an apoplectic response from Kurdish unity government President, Jalal Talabani. Iran is at least as hostile to the notion of an independent Kurdistan blossoming in northern Iraq as the Turks, and Jaafaris Daawa Party as well as the larger Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim are united in a pro-Iranian bloc. Sadr, who has played the role of political broker ensured the hair-thin majority required for Jaafari to beat out the SCIRI prime ministerial candidate, Adel Abdul Mahdi, who had to settle for the Vice Presidency. Sadr secured his place as a power broker thus, as well as the contingent loyalty of Jaafari. There are credible reports now of a Kurdish-Sunni alliance to balance the IranianTurkish condominium manifested in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA the Hakim-Jaafari bloc). Curiously enough, Sadr himself is the only prominent Shia who has consistently warned of splitting Sunni from Shia, always directing his ire toward the American occupation, and arguing for a consolidated but truly independent Iraq. People should think twice before playing poker with this man. Regardless of repeated doomsday predictions of an impending US or Israeli attack on Iran, not only is the US in a position where an attack on Iran would precipitate a seismic Shia resistance within Iraq that would quickly translate into an American military defeat, the US even with all its saber-rattling rhetoric directed at Tehran was conducting back-channel communications with the Iranian government since last February. Bush may have finally gotten a clue after all this time that the Cheney-Rumsfeld factions prediction of turning corners in Iraq, and encouraging even more reckless behaviors, has borne nothing but poisonous fruit. Holding discussion with Iranians about 60

how they might pull the US cookies out of the Iraqi fire is about as grim an irony as can be imagined, and is likely too little too late. Talabani was frothing by late March at hearing of these talks, and accused the Iranians of trying to destabilize the Iran-Iraq border of Kurdistan which they very well may be doing. There are at least two credible reports circulating of American massacres, one in Haditha last year, and one near Balad on the 15th of March at a village named Abu Sifa. Babies murdered execution style with a single bullet to the head. These are widely spoken of inside Iraq, where word travels fast. It seems another splash of irony, talking about hornets, that the latest recapture-theinitiative attack, Operation Swarmer, billed as a bold offensive, swept into Samarra only to meet no resistance and haul off 50 detainees. The difference between perception and reality real hornets and imaginary ones is evident yet again in Iraq. In April, 2006, a whole phalanx of retired generals joined a call for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. In response to that I wrote a commentary for From the Wilderness. As a way of further exploring the social relations of the Energy War, because as I told a friend recently, the symptoms of the larger problem dont appear in day-to-day form with a sign around their necks, I am including it below. (July, 2006)

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The Night of the Generals (Originally published at From the Wilderness, April, 2006 Achilles is given a clear choice. He is told that he carries two destinies: If I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,/my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;/but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,/the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be long life/left for me, and my end in death will not come quickly. The primacy of honor is memorialized in Achilles choice to stay and fight. The conflict between what the hero must do for honor as opposed to even life itself is replicated in other ways in the heros situation. In the role of the hero, one finds the prelude to the tensions and conflicts that structure the polis at later centuries. The political community as a community exists only on the battlefield, where the collective good of the community can be the primary concern of the hero. The community both sustains and provides for the warrior-hero and sends him to possible death the warrior-hero experienced the conflict between the collective good as an end in itself, and as an instrument of his own glory and honor. The highest good for the warrior-hero is not, as Socrates/Diotoma point out in the Symposium, a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of public esteem, and through this esteem, immortality. -from Money, Sex, and Power Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, by Nancy C. M. Hartsock (Northeastern University Press, 1985) Overdetermination. It means that one should never seek only one, linear cause-and-effect that produces any phenomenon. There are multiple forces working in multiple directions that fold into every moment even historical ones. Like weather patterns that result in storms. Exempting the weird and slippery Wesley Clark whose presidential pretensions long ago led him to critique the Bush administration, and Eric Shinseki who was Rumsfelds first object lesson on dissent there is now a new conspiracy of generals who are circling around Rumsfeld, and through him, to Caesar Texanius himself. They include retiring Generals Zinni, Newbold, Swannack, Riggs, Batiste, and Eaton. The Generals rebellion is unprecedented, precisely because the rapidity of the collapse of the Bush administration is unprecedented. The walls are tumbling down. Even Oberstgruppenfhrer Peter Pace, when ostensibly defending the embattled Sec-Def, couldnt resist backhanding Rummy for his treatment of General Eric Shinseki in the early hours of the war. The commentary about this is so omnipresent it has created a chattering vortex. Alas, I am being sucked irresistibly in, because a point has been missed. Is it the clannishness of the Generals? Are they still pissed off at how Archduke Donald dissed them at every meeting, at how he treated their fraternity-brother, Shinseki

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when Sir Eric told Rumsfeld (in his roundabout, diplomatic way) that his network-centric warfare doctrine was a half-baked lunacy? Is it the progress of the Fitzgerald investigations, methodically trenching their way toward the White House like Giaps foot-soldiers digging their way into the perimeter of Dien Bien Phu? Do they see that when this edifice falls, the investigations into Abu Ghraib and Bucca and Haditha and Fallujah will suddenly cast the nets much more widely than one demoted (female!) General and a handful of enlisted people? Are the Generals preparing to tie Rumsfeld, and perhaps even Gonzalez with him, to a sacrificial stake? Is it because they are seeking allies among the Democrats as that other shithouse burns? Do they need someone to watch their collective political back? At least some of the Democrats have been sufficiently frightened committed imperialists that they are that the lunatic fringe of the administration might decide on the diplomatic-suicide-bombing of an attack against Iran. It is all these things. It is overdetermined. But there is one overarching reason, and that reason itself has a dual character. The US is losing the war. No doubt many of them, including General John Vines (the gadfly still working at CENTCOM who has repeatedly warned that the insurgency is large and it is Iraqi), really believe the war was winnable, if only always be alert when you hear that retrojected conditionality if only we had sent in 500,000 instead of 130,000, if only we hadnt cashiered the Baathist troops, if only those prison photos hadnt gotten out, if, if, if. If only a frog had wings, it wouldnt bump its ass every time it hops. But frogs dont have wings, and this war was never winnable, under any circumstances. We dont get to decide that. The Iraqis do, and they have. The question of win-ability, which the Generals and their new pals in the Democratic Party continually raise is a smokescreen, even for those who deploy it to delude themselves. I personally know David Grange, CNN military expert, retired General. We drank and debauched together when I was at Delta. We spotted each other in the weight room. My team trained him when he came to the unit. He was my Squadron Commander, and later my Regimental Commander at 75th Rangers. Dave is now tentatively joining the chorus. His father was once the most decorated General in the Army. Ill use Dave Grange to make my point about the twofold character of this Night of the Generals, and its relation to losing the war. Because Dave did not participate in this one, except as a spokesperson, as a television personality who put on oh-so-serious masculine airs and repeated mindless mantras about strategy and tactics to a guileless audience in order to paint the slaughter as a contest instead of a conquest So why should he care; and why should he join this chorus? He is not under the gun if Geneva gets dusted off. He cant be blamed for the defeat of the worlds most expensive killing apparatus by sandal-clad barbarians. What obliges him to jump into this new, flame-retardant shithouse? The answer to that is revealed inside the twofold character of this rebellion. The first aspect of this Janus is referenced by Hartsock in the lead-quote. Neither Grange, nor the other Generals, are in it for the money at least most of them arent. CEOs make 400 times what workers do, but Generals barely make a 14 times what a Private does. Nor are they in it, as Hartsock says, for a quiet conscience.

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They are seeking public esteem, and through this esteem, immortality. They grew up with the history of kings and generals as we all did; and Grange lived with a highly esteemed General; and this was their collective aspiration. There is a little boy in them all that wants to be the warrior-hero. And the public perception of them critically important to the whole enterprise of war in this post-modern epoch where heroic spectacles have to be created as overwriting narratives to conceal the banality of evil is a perception that they will all retain or lose, together. Losing or winning, as Achilles tale points out, is not the issue for the warrior, but having fought for the polis: the warrior-hero experienced the conflict between the collective good as an end in itself, and as an instrument of his own glory and honor. In modern imperial warfare, the hero is a mere cipher for the public imagination. That the Generals seek after it makes it no less imaginary. Colin Powell never experienced this conflict, because he has always seen himself first as a cunning bureaucrat and in war he wanted nothing less than to prove anyones manhood. Avoid conflict when you can, he said, and when you cant, go in big. Be the bully, or stay home. Not being European, perhaps he is less enamored of feudal warrior myths, their feats of derring-do. Modern conventional war is deeply and inescapably bureaucratic. Bureaucracies dont require heroes. They require yes-men and yes-women. And at some gut level, people know that this is the antithesis of heroism. In the superlative film, Thin Red Line, there is a scene where an aging Colonel (played by Nick Nolte) blurts out to a subordinate, Ive eaten buckets of shit to get here. Youre only 23, and you already have your war. I may never get another chance. All these Generals signed on. Including Dave Grange. Every last one of them ate shit, in co-signing this war. If they knew something was wrong, they didnt say a word until it was too late. Grange got on CNN and cheer-led the whole thing, while the news-models drooled all over him oh, thank you, General Grange, and he and all the others, when this was still a glorious war, lapped that shit up like dehydrated Bassett hounds. They thought they could have their bureaucratic cake and eat their hero cake but it was the same cake, and it had a name and a people: Iraq. So Rumsfeld will be the conceited civil authority who stabbed them all in the back, and with his sacrifice they can all be restored. They are engaged in this little conspiracy for the same reason people whisper bargains at the sky in the back pews of churches. The night is long and dark indeed. They are trying to salvage their immortality.

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The War for Saudi Arabia (Written for Sanders Research Associates, August 9, 2004) Oil is not a normal commodity. No other commodity has five US navy battle groups patrolling the sea lanes to secure it. -Mark Jones It was in early August, in the wake of the most strictly scripted Democratic Party convention in US history, that presidential candidate and Senator John Kerry began broadcasting his claim to the US electorate that he would cut troop numbers in Iraq. This claim, of course, is as preposterous as the same claim made by the Republicans before they oversaw the invasion of Mesopotamia. Kerry is not saying he will take unilateral action to disengage the American occupation of Iraq. He is saying he will work with our allies to put a deal together over the course of time to cut numbers before the end of his first term January, 2009. This is the kind of hollow oath that is taken with the frequency of a piss every general election cycle. Such a plan is so contaminated with shifting variables outside the rule of a US administration as to be utterly meaningless, and Kerry goddamn well knows it. He is pandering to the growing popular discontent with the occupation among US voters, at the same time attempting to induce mass amnesia about his own original support for the war which was also pandering. He will dance around the ring until November with one central campaign tactic to prove that he is not George W. Bush. This is a tough period for politicians in both the United States and Great Britain, because the wheels have fallen off Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the underlying crisis which none of them can publicly name is growing more urgent with each passing day. The Bush administration itself has been forced by electoral pressure into ever more reckless economic policies to ameliorate what might become a chronic recession (or even stagflation). The current uptick in the so-called economic indicators, based on consumer spending, are a combination of historically low interest rates that have fueled equity-loans against refinanced home mortgages and a flash flood of fictitious value rushing into a housing market bubble, the collapse of which could rival the dot-com crash of 2000 in its liquidation of fictional value. A one-time tax refund boosted the mad dash to buy new SUVs and home entertainment systems, and the average personal debt load of Americans already astronomical went up correspondingly. The administration is hoping they can duplicate the Reagan administrations military Keynesianism of substituting the state via Defense spending for a manufacturing export market, at the same time that the United States falls more deeply into its unpayable international debt to finance the counterinsurgency in Iraq. While the election itself does not constitute a primary contradiction on the world stage right now, it has further delayed decisive action to reverse the reverses of the Bush administration, and left whoever wins the 2004 US electoral ritual holding a bag of rattlesnakes. The real war being fought, and the staffs of both Bush and Kerry know it, is related to a terrifying crisis about which they can say not one word to the American people. Just 65

as the Democrats themselves circled their wagons to protect the fraudulent 2000 electoraljudicial fiat in order to avoid a constitutional crisis that could undermine the legitimacy of the whole system they are now being forced to collaborate with their elite rivals in sending the American public on a snipe hunt to avoid that public seeing an ugly imperial reality. The war is about terrorism all right, but not the way most people imagine. And the issue is not how that war is managed or who is responsible for the intelligence failures. What is at stake is the entire unipolar world system, and our beleaguered imperial rulers now have their attention riveted upon Saudi Arabia. The recent Michael Moore documentary, Fahrenheit 911, that grossed more than any documentary in history, laid heavy emphasis on Saudi Arabia and its connections with the Bush family. This was valuable in shifting the usual premises of public discourse in the heavily-indoctrinated United States, but it was also illusory. The Bush-Saudi connections are reflective of a deeper structural connection that both the left and the right, for different reasons, seem unwilling to discuss. The right doesnt want to tell the people that it must have Persian Gulf oil for continued capital accumulation, regardless of the consequences, or that the decline of living standards all over the world has already begun to encroach even upon the working class of the United States in order to finance that accumulation. The left doesnt want to tell the same people that their living standards are destined to fall based on the energetic limits to growth, regardless of who is in power, or that this decline will happen sooner rather than later if our imperial government fails to secure military control over Southwest Asia. They are interested in stopping the war (and I share this goal, even though it will ultimately mean economic hardship for the West), painting the right as the source of all our problems, and procrastinating about revealing the tougher truth that no simple political brake in the US will be sufficient to stop us running over the fossil energy bluff. The complexity of the question of Saudi Arabia makes it impossible to say exactly how and when the decisive historical shift that is now in progress will finally play out. Still, it is helpful to lay out some of the constituent parts of the current conjuncture as a way of developing some credible hypotheses, in particular my own that we may be seeing the initial stage of the historical obsolescence of conventional imperial military power. The United States is particularly vulnerable to any disruption in the constant flow of inexpensive oil more vulnerable than any society in history. We have developed a social infrastructure not just around ground transportation that requires petroleum-based fuel, but around the private automobile. This does not mean that we simply use a lot of cars. Cars are no longer a luxury in the United States, but an absolute necessity because of the spatial separation inhering in our economic specialization. We are absolutely dependent on the oceanic web of asphalt that connects every economic activity to every other with roads for private automobiles. The nearest grocery store to my home is two and a half miles away, and my spouse commutes 35 minutes each way to her job each day. Public transportation systems, with a few exceptions in places like New York, are ludicrously inadequate. Any disruption in oil flow would have immediate and near catastrophic consequences for the US. Economic dislocations in the United States, it mist be said, will pole-axe the rest of the world, for two reasons.

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First, the current stability of currency markets is underwritten by the inherently unstable system of dollar hegemony. Central banks around the world have cached US Treasury bills as currency reserves in a dollar-dominated world system. When the unpayable international dollar overhang finally breaks off and these nations are obliged to sell off their dollars during the free-falling dollar devaluation, the shock to their domestic economies will hit like the Bam earthquake. Secondly, the most significant consumer of export goods in the world is the United States. In fact, with the deindustrialization of the US economy and the rise of debtleverage imperialism, the US has taken on the distinctive role of world consumer of last instance. Abrupt decline in consumer demand in the US could easily lead to an equally abrupt overproduction crisis among export economies and precipitate a synchronized global recessionary nosedive. The pricing of petroleum is not solely an issue of market value in the usual sense. While supply and demand certainly are associated with each other, as we are about to see in the post-peak-oil era, determination of prices has typically been a closely monitored monetary and political question. Petroleum rents in the Gulf States have been assessed more to ensure the longer-term stability of rentier-regimes than to allow market equilibrium; this is a political calculation, not a merely economic one. The price of oil in the west has been used carefully to balance the profits of oil entrepreneurs against the larger financial equation of inflation. When inflation is seen as a threat which is almost always in the arithmetical cosmos of economists holding oil prices down, along with wages (by increasing unemployment with Fed interest rate hikes), becomes a prime directive. The paradox of pricing, as Andrew McKillop of the International Association of Energy Economists points out, is that higher prices would actually benefit the aggregate world economy, if we are using aggregate growth as the benchmark for improvement. The rub is that the economies that will most benefit from oil price increases, and whose economic advances would constitute the bulk of this improvement, are not the EuroAmerican metropoles. McKillop: Higher oil prices operate to stimulate first the world economy, outside the OECD countries, and then lead to increased growth inside the OECD. This is through the income or revenue effect on oil exporter countries, and then on metals, minerals and agrocommodity exporter countries, most of them Low Income (GNP per capita below $400/year). Almost all such countries have very high marginal propensity to consume. That is any increase in revenues, due to prices of their export products increasing in line with the oil price, is very rapidly spent, on purchasing manufactured goods and services of all kinds. In the 1973-81 period, in which oil price rises before inflation were of 405%, the New Industrial Countries of that period - notably Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore experienced very large and rapid increases in demand for their exports. These three countries increased their oil imports in under 8 years through the 1973-81 period, and despite the 405% price rise, by 60% to 80% in volume terms. This macroeconomic mechanism of higher revenues for fast spending poorer countries quickly levering up world economic growth (the 67

very simplest type of Keynesianism, but at the global level) is easily triggered by rising oil and real resource prices, and flatly contradicts the arguments by authorized 'experts' who opine that higher oil prices 'hurt poorer countries the most'. Higher revenue earnings for many low income oil exporter countries, and also for the special case of Saudi Arabia may be the only short-term way to stop these countries falling into civil strife, insurrection or ethnic war. McKillop supports his thesis with a consistent empirical correspondence between higher oil prices and increased demand, counter-intuitive as this may seem. The facts that make this a zero sum game between the metropolitan North and the under-developed South and therefore a structural antagonism between these two aspects of the world system are both geological and political. All perfidious claims to the contrary, OECD economies are not now less reliant on oil imports than they were during the oil shock of the 1970s. Import-dependence in these countries has risen from 25% in 1990 to over 50% today, and the chief pig at the trough is the United States, with a per capita consumption rate of 25.6 barrels a year within a world average of around 4.51 barrels a year. Per capita consumption in China is one-third of the world average, and in India only one-quarter. To see the deeper trend, however, it must be noted that world per capita consumption in 1980 was 5.28 barrels a year (higher than today), when oil prices were (in adjusted PPP dollars) $100 a barrel. The fundamental problem is that (1) the world cannot produce oil fast enough to maintain current average world consumption, and (2) demand is increasing. The current United States government understands this perfectly, and so does John Kerry. Global demand this year is approximately 79.5 million barrels a day (mbd), if you believe the US Department of Energy which has a tendency to rationalize its figures in order to make production and demand match. DOE and the OECD IEA claim that output will increase to 115 mbd by 2020 to meet demand, but they calculate global demand rising at 1-1.25% each year. In fact, current demand is tracking up each year by 2.25%, even as many experts who are not on someones payroll as professional Pollyannas say that if we achieve world stability and commit to massive infrastructure improvements, global output can be pushed no further than 84-87 mbd. Even this is optimistic. Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons has studied the Saudi oil fields in detail and for some time now. When the Energy Information Agency (EIA) stated in 2004 that Saudi Arabia will need to boost its production from its current 8 million barrels a day to 20 million, he was aghast. The EIA was basing its projections on the claim that Saudi Arabia contains adequate known reserves (260 billion barrels) for production at these rates for 90 years. Saudi Arabia has six significantly productive oil fields, Simmons points out, Ghawar being the leviathan that regurgitates 5 million of the 8 each day. The others are Abqiaq, Safaniyah, Zuluf, Berri, and Shaybah. Of all of them, only Shaybah has produced for under 30-50 years. The flow rate in these fields has been maintained through water injection at the margins of the fields that maintains flow pressure in the area around the center, called the oil column.

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In every one of these fields, this oil column is shrinking, and every one of them is experiencing progressively greater problems with water migrating into the crude. Interruptions in the flow are called water cuts. Water is settling under the oil, and the water-oil line is rising. So ARAMCO (the state oil corporation) began using horizontal drilling to harvest the crude above the water-oil line, but water cuts were still occurring. New technology has now been employed to network the horizontal wells, monitor for water cuts, and automatically close the water cuts then transfer extraction to another point in the network. There have also been more frequent flow interruptions due to gas. Claims of both the EIA and the Saudi government, if checked against historical data, are not very reliable, but the Saudis make even more wildly optimistic projections than the EIA. Simmons suspects that all the Saudi fields have already peaked eight years before even the pessimists predicted it would happen, and that they are now entering a period of permanent decline. One of those pessimists, petroleum geologist Dr. Colin Campbell, has been warning the public for years now that stockbrokers, oil executives, and government agencies lie about oil reserves, or twist the numbers to conceal the most fundamental fact that the world is at or extremely near global peak production. All of this is so incredibly obvious, Campbell said, being clearly revealed by even the simplest analysis of discovery and production trends. The inexplicable part is our great reluctance to look reality in the face and at least make some plans for what promises to be one of the greatest economic and political discontinuities of all time. Time is of the essence. It is later than you think. Saudi claims that they could up production to 15 mbd for the next 50 years were put to the test by recent oil price hikes that have begun to threaten the Untied States with an inflationary spike. The US pleaded with OPEC and with Saudi Arabia to increase output. When terror threats against the US sent prices soaring above the $40 a barrel mark in August (2004), the plea to OPEC became more urgent. There is no more supply, OPEC president Purnomo Yusgiantoro told them on August 2nd. Oil hit a new record that day on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The Saudis waffled, saying they would need more time to achieve the production hikes. The cat, it seemed, was out of the bag. When two consecutive and highly successful attacks were executed within three days against Iraqs northern oil pipeline, the price of crude jumped to $44. Noting that the PPP adjusted price of oil during the Carter era was once $100, that shouldnt seem an issue, but the Bush administration is now struggling to keep its economic numbers inflated during their feeble jobless recovery until November. Interest rates are still rock bottom, and if inflation accelerates, there is no interest rate weapon to use against it that doesnt threaten the US with a second consecutive recessionary dip. Employment figures released in August already grossly distorted because they are measured by the number of unemployment insurance filings and not actual un/underemployment were a crushing disappointment to economists and the Bush administration that had both predicted the addition of 200,000 jobs to the US economy. This is likely to dampen any enthusiasm the Fed might have for the interest rate hikes they recently hinted were inbound. Chinese demand for imported crude by 2020 is projected to rise to 7 mbd. This year, it will pass Japan as the second largest national importer of oil, after the US.

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There is a collision about to occur. The chief colliders over oil are the United States on one side, consuming almost 20 mbd now, and rapidly industrializing China on the other. Neither of these countries is self-sufficient in oil production, and both are on steep demand-increase trendlines. So the question becomes twofold: Where is the oil? Who can elevate production? Dick Cheneys so-called Energy Plan for the US called for an additional 7.5 mbd by 2020. The cost of the counter-insurgency in Iraq alone right now in Department of Defense oil consumption is around 350,000 barrels a day. Most people do not have a real appreciation of the immense oil dependency of the US military. This means the Iraq war alone is approaching 2% of total US consumption. The US strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) is sufficient to provide around 50 days of US supply at current demand levels. Iraqs pre-invasion production was 2.5 mbd, and it is now stuck at 1.8 mbd in the face of persistent guerrilla attacks against contractors and sabotage of the pipelines a net loss of 700,000 barrels a day on the world market from fallen production and combined with the energy expenditure of the occupation, less the cost of a peacetime military, around a million barrels a day now being lost to the Bush-Cheney war. The dual role of the Persian Gulf countries becomes progressively clearer in light of the numbers. Not only does this region supply 18 percent of US oil imports; it is the only region that has any putative capacity to boost production for the purpose of shifting prices (though as weve seen, this is in doubt). Moreover, it is the only region that (ostensibly) has not reached its Hubbert peak of production, and therefore the sole oil patch that is not objectively in decline in a world where demand has the American and Asian locomotives howling straight at each other on the same track. In terms of its international demand-competition, the imperative for the US having chosen uninterrupted capital accumulation above all other priorities has become what McKillop calls demand destruction, which includes ripping up the existing development of peripheral countries and curtailing the development of semi-peripheries like the Asian giants. This leaves 'demand destruction' as the sole option and real response to any large rise in oil or gas prices, through economy destruction by the interest rate weapon. The last time this was done, in 1980-83, oil prices were surely reduced through cutting economic activity in general. Oil prices in today's dollars fell from $100/barrel in late 1979 [PPP adjusted] to around $60/barrel in 1984, but the collateral economic and social damage was awesome. Unlike today, however, the OECD economy started from a position of growth, with balanced budgets in many countries including the USA, in 1979-80. The world economy could and did take the horse medicine of sky-high interest rates without imploding into a sequence like that of 1929-31, but there is no certainty or guarantee this would be the case today - no 'soft landing' is currently on offer. The United States is now caught between the Scylla of economic stagnation temporarily perched atop a potential avalanche of personal debt and the Charybdis of inflation if fuel prices continue to rise the specter of the temporal coincidence of stagnation and inflation stagflation. 70

The actions of the Bush administration are not, as presumed by the vast and spectacularly stupid population that has been convinced of American invincibility, acting out of a position of strength, but of overpowering crisis and radical instability. The US is aggressively attempting to diversify its oil sources, not just in the Gulf where it has ensnared itself in the toxic miasma of Iraq, but in Latin America, Africa, and the Caspian Basin. In all these regions, the populations have been bled white by the debtpeonage of US-directed structural adjustment programs, and anti-American sentiment is at an all time high. This animosity is further inflamed in the Caspian Basin and the Gulf by the unrepentant support for Zionism by the US and the current administrations invocation of the Crusades in its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. None of these countries, however, compares to Saudi Arabia in its strategic centrality to the world system right now, or its centrality to US hegemony within that system. And it appears that one Saudi revolutionary has apprehended both this centrality and the increasing frangibility of that system Osama bin Laden. There really is a war between Osama bin Laden and the United States, and the war is for Saudi Arabia. This war has monumental geopolitical consequences waiting in the wings, and we have already seen the first of them if we are paying attention the military balance of power has irrevocably changed in the world. The attack of September 11, 2001, has been extensively judged through the lenses of morality. Its time we judge it from a military perspective, because this was a brilliantly conceived and almost flawlessly executed martial strike at the military, political, and financial centers of the United States by a non-state actor. There was good reason for the administration to have been stunned and confounded by these strikes. They graphically demonstrated the vulnerability of the United States and all the metropolitan countries. As Mark Jones wrote on September 18, 2001: The truth is that the civilian populations of all the advanced industrial states are hostages penned inside extremely dangerous concentrations of chemical, nuclear, biochemical and other volatile industrial complexes. And all of us living in the west are vulnerable to attacks by toxic or biological warfare agents as well as by suitcase nukes, planes launched at reactor buildings etc. Clearly, arguments from historical precedent no longer apply... For the first time in 250 years, since the industrial revolution gave the west unlimited military superiority over all its enemies and victims, the West has decisively lost that military advantage, and we are therefore entering new and uncharted waters. A new era in world history has been opened, and it is clearly a transitional era, an epoch of contestation in which the traditional advantage enjoyed by the capitalist states is no longer so certain as it was. Lashing out at Afghanistan was a purgative exercise in revenge, and likely the execution of a plan that was already on the books considering the invasion was prepared in only a month. As many have pointed out, the Pakistani government had been put on notice by the Americans as early as July 2001 of an impending October invasion, and a

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trans-Afghan pipeline was already under consideration by Hamid Karzais ex-employer, Unocal. What the Afghanistan invasion proved was that the US military had become an unstoppable force in the world of course, we pretty much knew that when it comes to militarily wrecking any state that doesnt have a nuclear deterrent. The Taliban government was scattered in short order. But the other thing that became apparent, if it wasnt already from the September 11 attacks, was that the US military is singularly incapable of stopping many determined non-state actors. Both Taliban fighters and bin Ladens Arabs, no longer obliged to protect and preserve a state apparatus, were free to scatter into the mountain wilderness along the Afghan-Pakistani border, from where they may again show that they can strike at a time and place of their choosing. They already roam and strike in southern Afghanistan with almost monotonous regularity. This lesson did not register in Washington, DC. Guided by the fevered martial imaginations of career non-combatants like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, they decided to destroy the Iraqi state once and for all which they did, creating yet another stateless milieu of 26 million mostly hostile inhabitants with access to an inconceivable supply of weapons and explosives. The deep underlying crisis has been complicated by a fairly straightforward military crisis. The US has tied up the bulk of its ground combat forces in an un-winnable guerrilla conflict. That conflict just happens to be adjacent to Saudi Arabia, and the hostility of the Iraqis toward the Americans is now a regional contagion. Osama bin Laden, once you overlook his obscurantist chatter, has always been relatively direct. He has stated two objectives. One, he wanted the non-Muslim military forces out of Saudi Arabia. Two, he wants to overthrow the House of Saud. Over the last year, the United States has quietly begun acquiescing to the first demand. While Americans have not paid this much attention, the furious masses in the Muslim Crescent have; and bin Ladens stature has never been greater. Lets examine for a moment how much closer he may be coming to his second goal. There are two implicit steps bin Laden has to take: (1) topple the existing regime, and (2) seize power for his own faction. Paul Michael Wihbey of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, writing just after the September 11 attacks, said that, contrary to much of the conventional wisdom about Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive is hardly a madman. In fact, he has developed a stunningly deceptive regional war calculus that stands a reasonable chance of success. Despite the massive build-up of allied forces, bin Laden's strategy depends on a set of well-conceived geopolitical assumptions that he fervently believes can turn Western military capability to his strategic advantage. What, then, are the factors and assumptions in this war calculus? Many observers err in focusing exclusively on the internecine low-intensity war that characterizes the Royal Family. This is certainly part of that calculus, but it ignores approximately 19 million other Saudis, and around 9 million foreign professionals/workers who constitute a significant portion of these two essential economic strata. Those foreigners have come under ever more frequent attack, and the Saudi government and economy is extremely dependent on foreign professionals. Any precipitous out-migration of this stratum will be a body blow to the Saudi system.

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Alarmed by the frequency and success of the attacks, the Saudi government offered an amnesty in July to militants, after discovering the head of American Paul Johnson in the freezer of Saleh al Awfi after a police raid. Radio Free Europe correspondent Jeffery Donovan wrote that: The government had predicted that the amnesty would greatly aid a campaign to rein in militants. Shortly after the amnesty was announced, Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, vowed that Riyadh would win its war on terrorism. We are not fighting this war for public-relations purposes, al-Jubeir said. We are fighting this war to ensure the safety and security of our citizens and our residents. People in Saudi Arabia are being murdered. We have every intention of stopping those murders. We do it for our sake. Al-Qaeda has appeared determined to bring down the Saudi ruling family through a wave of suicide bombings and kidnappings, mainly aimed at terrorizing the 9 million foreigners who play a vital role in the world's dominant oil industry. Some 90 people have been killed in the attacks since May 2003. This pressure against foreigners is coming as the situation for average Saudis themselves steadily deteriorates. Since 1975, the rate of urbanization in Saudi Arabia has gone from around 59% to nearly 90%, and in many urban neighborhoods, population density is as high as a thousand per square kilometer. In 1973, when Saudi Arabia led OPEC in its historic embargo, the population of Saudi Arabia was 6.76 million. This tripling of population in three decades, in conjunction with the massive urbanization of the Saudi population, is further complicated by an age shift. Over 40% of Saudis are now under 15 years old. This demographic left-shift is combined with historically high unemployment and the steady erosion of Saudi Arabian per capita income, $28,000 in actual dollars in 1982, now fallen in actual dollars to less than $7,000. This is in part due to the venality of the political leadership, whose profligacy is legendary. But it is also due to low oil prices, an imperial tribute to the United States above all, and partly to balance the influence of Israel in the region. Peter, the people, is being robbed to pay Paul, the regimes mighty American security guarantor and investment banker. Sixty percent of Saudi foreign investment is in the United States, and the Saudi Royals are heavily invested in the US financial sector. This investment is growing, rising from a Saudi-to-US FDI in 1998 of $2.7 billion to $4.4 billion by 2001 when the World Trade Center fell. Any blow to the US financial establishment reverberates through Saudi Arabia, and this heavy Saudi investment significantly disinclines either country to disentangle with the other. Saudi Arabia loses approximately $2.5 billion every time the price of oil drops by one dollar a barrel. Its public debt is over 120% of its GDP. So the Saudis pay a high price for providing their US benefactor cheap oil. The US manages to sweeten this bitter medicine with the largest single outlay of US foreign military sales in the world - $33.5 billion in military hardware alone. Another festering issue in Saudi Arabia is water. In June, 2003, Arab News reported:

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Frequent interruptions of the water supply have led to acute water shortages in different parts of the city during the seasonable hot weather. In some areas residents have left their homes because of undependable supplies of water. The Ministry of Water and Electricity has assured us time and again that the problem of water scarcity is at the top of its agenda, but it has failed to address the grievance so far, despite its claim to be working hard to find a lasting solution, said Ibrahim Al-Owain, an apartment owner. A number of Saudis have expressed their anger at the continuing interruptions in the water supply just as the heat of summer arrived. On the other hand, the ministry claims that some 40 percent of the citys daily water consumption can be saved if waste is eliminated. The problem is compounded by an increase of some 50,000 cubic meters in daily consumption during the summer. Daily consumption in Saudi Arabia is high at 400 liters a day, compared to the average individual consumption in other countries where it ranges from 180 to 220 liters, according to a recent report. Riyadh residents say that the problem has made their lives miserable. They called on the ministry to review the situation carefully and find solutions on a priority basis. In 1999, Population Reports issued a study called Solutions for a Water-Short World, in which it stated, Saudi Arabia presents one of the worst cases of unsustainable water use in the world. This extremely arid country now must mine fossil groundwater for threequarters of its water needs. Fossil groundwater depletion in Saudi Arabia has been averaging around 5.2 billion cubic meters a year. Only half of Saudi Arabias water is supplied by its massive desalinization capacity (37 facilities). The other half comes from its aquifers. The depletion rate of Saudi aquifers is directly tied to the water injection technology required to maintain Saudi oil flow rates. So the biologically essential mineral, water, is being exhausted in order to continue exploiting the economically necessary mineral-commodity, oil. One could hardly imagine a more painful dilemma for an unstable regime sitting atop an increasingly restive population. The water issue is experienced as a water shortage in the cities now, but over 85% of Saudi Arabias aquifer water is used for agriculture, and depletion has had a deleterious effect on this sector of the Saudi economy. Lester Brown of the Earth Watch Institute, writing this year, explained, During the late 1980s, Saudi Arabia launched an ambitious plan to become self-sufficient in wheat. By tapping a deep underground aquifer, the Saudi's raised grain output from 300,000 tons in 1980 to 5 million tons in 1994. Unfortunately the aquifer could not sustain large-scale pumping and by 2003 the wheat harvest had fallen to 2.2 million tons. These three cascading trends of oil depletion, aquifer depletion, agricultural shortage are trends against which Saudi Arabias demographic shifts and social dislocations are creating a treacherous social fault line. It is against this backdrop that we must understand the political standoff in the House of Saud.

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The internet is littered with stories detailing the struggles within the Saudi Royal family. A Google search using the four words Saudi, royal, family, and intrigue yields over 3,000 links. This article will not attempt to explore the fracture lines in the House of Saud in exquisite detail, then. Instead, I will only construct a cursory outline of the latent instability in the Saudi government. At the center of the instability is the power struggle over succession. [The king died after this was written, and Abdullah succeeded him. SG] King Fahd has been incapacitated by a stroke since 1995, and a deathwatch has ensured ever since. Fahd has been in Europe being treated for his illness since 9/11. These diplomatic illnesses in the past have tended to coincide with intensified struggle within the Royal family factions. In the wake of King Fahds stroke in 1995, the Crown Prince, Abdullah, now the de facto ruler, left the country for a meeting in Oman. His rival, Prince Sultan who was the defense minister, used this opportunity to approach the Ulema (the Saudi religious authority) for support of his own bid for succession. The Ulema refused, and when Abdullah returned he mobilized the largely Bedouin National Guard for a very aggressive and very public military exercise. While few in the west understood the significance of this move-countermove, Saudi Arabia had teetered dangerously close to a civil war. Sultans faction has its popular base in the business stratum primarily preoccupied with international commerce, and in fact his son Prince Bandar a long standing friend to the Bush family is the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. Abdullah, on the other hand, has his base among the Bedouins (and therefore the National Guard) and the Ulema, the latter of which is highly suspicious of the westernized ways of Saudi compradors. What is notable here is that the vast majority of Saudis are left out of this social base calculation. They are up for grabs, as it were, and Osama bin Laden is in a grabbing frame of mind. Another dimension to this struggle is within the family itself, with the faction relating to Saudis international business sector infamously corrupt which they see not as corruption, but a royal entitlement and Abdullahs Bedouin military-clerical faction embracing political modernization which includes rooting out corruption to re-legitimize the Saudi state with its own population. It is important to note that Abdullah himself is in his late 70s, so the various leaderships in Saudi Arabia literally have a limited life expectancy, which could lead to successive intra-factional struggles for leadership. Prince Turki, the former Saudi chief of intelligence who had close ties to both the CIA and Pakistani intelligence, and therefore by extension to the Taliban (a creation of Pakistani intelligence), was fired just prior to the September 11 attacks. This was a highstakes firing that radically ratcheted up the factional tension. Though the Byzantine details are, as always, unclear, it appears that interior minister Prince Nayef disagreed violently with Turkis suggestions that the kingdom cooperate more fully with the American FBI, saying it would violate Saudi sovereignty. Nayef went to Abdullah demanding Turkis resignation. Turki is now ambassador to Great Britain. Prince Turki alleges that in 1998 he had arranged the extradition of Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia with the Taliban government in Afghanistan. This plan, according to Turki, was disrupted by the African embassy bombings which precipitated a US Cruise missile strike against Afghanistan and queered the extradition deal when Mullah Omar

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angrily reneged. Turki had long been warning his Taliban associates that bin Laden would bring evil down on the heads of the Taliban government. If this story contains any truth, then apparently bin Laden was already outmaneuvering the Saudi government in 1998, and effectively manipulating US policy vis--vis Afghanistan. The sudden departure of Turki just days before the September 11 strikes, given that the Pakistanis and probably the Saudis were already aware of US intentions to invade Afghanistan in October, may well have been an attempt in advance of Abdullahs government to distance itself from the Taliban, with which Turki was closely identified. At this point, the planners of September 11 had already pushed the start button on the operation. Bin Laden surely saw the simultaneous flare-up of Saudi court intrigue as anything but fortuitous for the Royal family. And the sudden diplomatic illness of King Fahd less than two weeks after September 11 always an indication of political crisis in the House of Saud was almost certainly counted a tactical victory by bin Laden. Wihbey, writing in 2002, explains the role of religion in swinging the population for political purposes: In its cynical pursuit of power at all costs, the House of Saud has often traded in religious fanaticism. In 1919, Ibn Saud employed Al-Ikhwan (the Brotherhood) - the precursor of bin Laden's al-Qa'eda - to confront and defeat his rival, the Hashemite Abdullah, at the Battle of Turabah. As Abdullah's camp was sleeping, the brethren fell upon it, slashing about with their daggers and screaming their war-cry: "The winds of paradise are blowing!" The military prowess and religious piety of the feared Ikhwan helped to mould the growing militancy of today's Wahhabite dissident clerics. No longer content to provide constitutional legitimacy to the House of Saud, they have, in recent years, issued fatwas condemning members of the royal family and demanding the overthrow of the Saudi regime. The longer bin Laden is able to evade American bombs, the more likely it is that he will conjure up the spirit of the Ikhwan among his Saudi followers. Against this backdrop, and with the memory of the bloody attempt by Iranian-inspired militants to seize the Grand Mosque in 1979, Crown Prince Abdullah may well seek Fahd's abdication. Bin Laden himself is no political outsider, as he has been portrayed by mainstream media and the US government. His father, Mohammed, one of the richest men in the world, was instrumental in the seizure of power from King Saud by King Faisal. Osama bin Laden has been a player on the Saudi political scene for many years, and in that role indirectly became a CIA asset [bin Laden has never been on the CIA payroll, or received personal training from them] for the US-sponsored proxy-war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. His decisive break with the Saudi Royal family came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Bin Laden, experienced now as a military facilitator in Afghanistan, offered to organize a popular army to repel any invasion by the Iraqis. When the Saudi Royals turned him down in no small part because they had intense reservations about arming 76

large sectors of the Saudi population and invited the American armed forces to use Saudi Arabia as a military launch platform, bin Laden was furious. It is important to note that while this was probably the genesis of bin Ladens planning for an overthrow of the Saudi government, he did not issue his fatwa against the United States until 1998, whereupon he is believed to have been involved in the planning of the attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. It is reasonable to infer, within the hypothesis presented here, that bin Laden saw the need to await the development of internal and external forces in Saudi Arabia and in the international situation for a decisive strike. While there was an attempt in 1993 to bomb the World Trade Center and a successful attack against the USS Cole, these were not in any way decisive. They had more the character of a reconnaissance in force, a probing tactic to observe reactions and to refine ones own methods. The embassy bombings, as we shall see however, may very well have been part of the larger strategic calculus leading to 9/11. It was with the election of a fanatical clique to the US executive branch that had repeatedly declared its intention to go forward with an ill-considered invasion of Iraq, an imminent invasion of Islamist bases in Afghanistan, with regional rage peaking against the Israeli response to the Palestinian Intifada, that bin Laden could have seen a unique confluence of forces in which a devastating strike against the United States could initiate a cascade of political consequences that would come crashing into Riyadh. The key to setting up the unstable House of Saud for a post-crisis takeover, from the perspective of a bin Laden, is the preparation of the already restless population. To quickly consolidate a political revolution, there must be an energized and militant mass movement that throws itself behind the new regime, as the Iranian masses did behind Khomeini in 1979. He has to mobilize the resentment of the Saudi masses against the House of Saud as a US puppet, and by extension associating them with Zionist Israel. He has to provide the emotional and ideological fuel for this struggle, and political Islam does that with the additional benefit of its emphasis on iron discipline. This kind of discipline is often craved by the masses once any political struggle is decisively engaged. How better than to invite the Americans into the region as an invading force, where they can become bogged down in the same way the Soviets did in Afghanistan where bin Laden cut his teeth as an asymmetric warrior? All that is required in this scenario is the catalyst. When one considers the plethora of targets available to the September 11 hijackers, targets that could have been far more devastating in loss of life and property damage, even near the actual targets think here of the Indian Point nuclear power facility, where the ignition of spent fuel and/or a core melt, in the right wind conditions, could indefinitely turn metropolitan New York and large swaths of the Eastern seaboard into a radiological wasteland then it is conspicuously apparent that the target selection was political. To call this a pure act of terror is a demagogic claim that requires intentional ignorance of the facts. The planners had no irrational desire to incinerate the West. Certainly they knew that, while these attacks would deliver a terrible blow, they would not precipitate a social or political collapse; and just as certainly they knew this attack would galvanize a vengeful anger among the general population. Hitting financial, political, and military headquarters makes perfect military sense in two respects first tactical, since these are high value social infrastructure, and second psychological, because it was a near 100% certainty that the US political establishment 77

would feel compelled to react swiftly and decisively even if there werent in Rumsfelds own words any good targets. Moreover, does anyone believe that this billionaire guerrilla was unfamiliar with the ravings that were openly available from neo-con think tanks that explicitly stated they would attempt this regional takeover if presented a new Pearl Harbor as a pretext? Bin Laden and his staff had close ties to Pakistani intelligence, which was well aware that the US was planning to militarily topple Afghanistan in October 2001. What better time for a pre-emptive attack already planned to the last detail against the United States than when the US was already leaning forward for a military action in the region, when there was a near certainty they would promptly follow through with the very plans for regional occupations that they had articulated on the public record? It is politicomilitary judo, using the momentum of the larger adversary to throw him. The calculation of bin Laden, in this scenario, is based on his experience in Afghanistan courtesy of the United States. Mamood Mamdani, a political scientist and cultural anthropologist at Columbia University, makes the case that what we now call terrorism is a direct outgrowth of the Cold War and the logical correlative of the post-Cold War political environment. In a 2003 New York Times article about Mamdani, by Hugh Eakin writes: In the varied explanations for the 9/11 attacks and the rise in terrorism, two themes keep recurring. One is that Islamic culture itself is to blame, leading to a clash of civilizations, or, as more nuanced versions have it, a struggle between secular-minded and fundamentalist Muslims that has resulted in extremist violence against the West. The second is that terrorism is a feature of the post-cold-war landscape, belonging to an era in which international relations are no longer defined by the titanic confrontation between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. But in the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani both those assumptions are wrong. Not only does he argue that terrorism does not necessarily have anything to do with Islamic culture; he also insists that the spread of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups. In practice, Mr. Mamdani has written, it translated into a United States decision to harness, or even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet. The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is not Islam but rather non-state violence in general, during the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan, he argues in his new book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon). The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of arms and money, he writes, but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence -- the formation of private militias -- capable of

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creating terror. The best-known C.I.A.-trained [sic] terrorist, he notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden. Robert Meister, commenting on the Mamdani thesis, said, Mahmood's argument is that terrorism is a defining characteristic of the last phase of the cold war. It was a characteristic that took on, especially in Africa [he speaks here of proxy-war Mamdani is originally from Uganda], a logic of its own, a logic that eventually broke free of the geopolitics that started it. The logic from which it broke free was the logic of the state as the principle actor in war. And Mamdani challenges the Orientalist rhetoric about this being some premodern phenomenon. Timothy Mitchell of New York University says, in the same NYT article, Scholar-pundits like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami tell us that the culture of Muslims or Arabs cannot cope with modernity. Mamdani shows us that the origins of political Islam are themselves modern, and, in fact, largely secular. Bin Ladens experience in Afghanistan was the experience of a tectonic shift in the dynamic of war with the emergence of non-state actors presenting new and still insoluble problems to the armed forces that are embedded in the larger political apparatus of the state, a state inherently constrained by its own domestic and international relations by its territorial logics. Bin Laden is applying that lesson to the United States right now, and the supreme historical irony is that he is doing so by having baited the US into a fight with his other arch-rival Iraq, just as the US encouraged the gory trench war between Iraq and Iran when bin Ladens allies were still, metaphorically speaking, on the CIA asset list. The ultimate irony (or ultimate brilliance of bin Laden as a strategist) is that bin Laden now shares a strategic goal with the neo-cons -- who dare not say it now -- of overthrowing the House of Saud. Certainly the neo-con think tanks are issuing a steady stream of vitriol now at the Saudis, just as they had been for decade prior to their invasion of Iraq. With the upcoming elections, spring-boarding off of Michael Moores Fahrenheit 911, the Democrats are now inveighing against Saudi Arabia as a bludgeon against the Republicans. And while elections years always shake out the differences between US elites about future political directions in the oblique double-speak of the campaigns, the more direct indication of a political crisis within the seated administration is when internal conflict in the government breaks out into public view. The Bush administrations ritual sacrifice of its own intelligence establishment for its miscalculations in foreign policy were almost certainly going to evoke retaliation from those within that establishment, especially those who warned the administration that they were heading down the path of self-destruction. In the August 9 edition of the Washington Times, Shaun Waterman reported that the anonymous CIA author of the new book entitled bluntly Imperial Hubris Why the West is Losing the War on Terror is actually analyst Mike Scheuer who has specialized in Osama bin Laden for several years. Scheuer was officially gagged by the administration. In his account, he called the Iraq invasion a tremendous gift to Osama bin Laden. It validated so many of the arguments he's made over the past decadeWe have the first one, the most important in the Arabian peninsula, we occupy that in their eyes [Saudi Arabia]We now occupy 79

Iraq, the second holiest place, and the Israelis have Jerusalem, the third The idea that we would smash any government that posed a threat to Israel - that's validated by our actionsAnd his claim that we lust after control of Arab oil; Iraq has the second greatest reserves in the Arab world So it's been an astounding victory for Osama bin Laden in terms of perceptions and perceptions are reality so often. Indeed, that Orientalist canard that bin Laden is a pre-modern warrior is belied in this statement. Perceptions are reality, and bin Laden is not the pre-modern embodiment of war, but the post-modern one that augurs ill for the US state and its military. We are seeing not an older face of war, but the newest one.

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Persian Peril Is the Bush administration about to commit the fatal imperial error in Iran? (Originally published in From The Wilderness, August 2004.) Neocons are frightening the rest of the US elite. The United States on Monday confirmed it had granted protected status to nearly 4,000 members of the People's Mujahadeen, Irans main armed opposition group, now confined to a military-run camp in Iraq. However, the State Department stressed that the move, which has drawn a warning from Tehran, had no effect on the US designation of the group -also known as the Mujahadeen e Khalq (MEK) or National Council of Resistance of Iran -- as a foreign terrorist organization. -Agence France Presse, July 26, 2004 Contrary to an increasingly popular belief, imperialism is not new, and it is not being produced by the right-wing clique that runs the present administration. This is easy to believe because of the slightly crazed character of the neo-cons, but it is deceptive precisely because it is such an easy conclusion to reach. In the past three weeks, Jimmy Carters former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been making the interview circuit to inaugurate a high level resistance to the apparent intent of the Bush administration to escalate -- perhaps even to the point of armed aggression -- its demonstrated hostility toward Iran. The emerging fight between the realists and the neo-cons will only serve to further muddy the waters on the question of what the neo-cons are up to and what the realists are up to as well. The so-called 9/11 Commission report, that has shamelessly identified the wrong scoundrels (the intelligence agencies) for the September 11 attacks (since they are already the goats for Iraq intelligence failures), is a mirror image of the obfuscation now being generated by the realist vs. neo-con debate. In every case, these public exchanges are designed to camouflage the real forces behind US policies. The US already has a track record for regime change in Iran, when the CIA orchestrated a coup detat against Mohammed Mossadegh. Most political history buffs know this story, and the American left is quick to cite it as a kind of passion play to demonstrate official hypocrisy on the question of democracy. But like many anecdotal accounts of history, this ignores a larger process and it obscures the relation of class forces that were the primary actors in many of these dramas. This essay will try to trace not only the development of a uniquely US imperialism and the danger that system faces in the present conjuncture, amplified and accelerated by its engagement in Southwest Asia, but the interplay of Anglo-American relations throughout the 20th Century that accounts for the Bush-Blair relation we see today. Iran is former Persia, and it is inhabited predominantly by people who consider themselves Persians. This is to be specifically contrasted with Arabs, as I will explain. Persian civilization, like all Old World societies, underwent a series of often-violent transformations that eventually led to a somewhat stable community sharing the same 81

language and culture. They even had their own religion, Zoroastrianism, which endured as the state religion until the mid 7th Century, when Arab armies swept over Persia and forced the conversion to Islam. Nevertheless, the Persians amalgamated their own distinct beliefs into Islam, creating a heterodox form of the religion as a cultural weapon against the oppressive Arab rulers. That form was Shiism. And while the Persians adopted the Arabic script, they reclaimed their own language, which we now call Farsi. It was the 19th Century when Great Britain established itself in Iran, when the venal Qajar monarchy parceled Iran out to foreign concessionaires at fire sale prices. The first British interest to gain a foothold there was the British Tobacco Company. The other great nation that coveted Iran was Russia, and it invaded Iran in 1826 seeking a warm water port to its south. In 1856, Great Britain attacked Iran and forced her to surrender what is now Afghanistan. Throughout the second half of the 19th Century, Great Britain and Russia would share Iran. It was at the turn of the century, in 1900, that a British company would stake its claim on a comparatively minor commodity, the petroleum of Southwest Iran, which would in short order become the most important commodity in the world. That company was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Russians had already begun taking oil from the north, around Baku. With the introduction of the automobile, the airplane, and mechanized warfare, by the time World War I broke out, Iran had captured the interest of the all the Great Gamesmen. This was a key co-location of Russian and British interest in their combined struggle against the Ottoman Turks (in World War I), who also shared a border with Iran and were equally covetous of Iranian oil. In 1920, an Iranian cavalry officer, Reza Shah, led a rebellion against the Qajar dynasty, and five years later Reza crowned himself. This was troublesome but not critical to the British and the Russians yet. Between the two world wars, however, Reza opened up several new trade partnerships. One was with Germany. By the time World War II broke out, over half of Irans trade was with Germany, now controlled by Hitlers Nazi Party. Reza had embarked on an industrialization program to more effectively exploit Irans oil, and most of its new machinery was German. Iran declared itself neutral in WWII, but the reality was that the British needed the oil, and the now-Soviet Union needed the warm water port and a rail line to receive supplies from the Americans and English, and both Stalin and Churchill had strong reasons to doubt the neutrality of Reza, so the British and Soviets conducted a concurrent military occupation of Iran in 1941, that lasted through all of WWII. This led to deep consternation in the United States, who while allied with the Soviets and the British had designs of its own, not the least of which was the British Empire itself. The US, as the dominant financial partner in the Allied war enterprise, prevailed on Britain and the USSR to accept Rezas son, whom the British and Soviets had themselves appointed as a figurehead, as the legitimate post-war ruler of Iran, and secured the promise of both occupiers that they would dismantle their military presence there upon cessation of hostilities. The British left immediately after the war, and the suspicious Russians (for good reason it would turn out) hung on until 1946, when they too departed under an atomic threat from US President Harry Truman.

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The Roosevelt administration that oversaw the entry into World War II was a new government imbued with a new philosophy of capitalist imperial governance. It is important to digress for a moment to describe that philosophy, because it goes to the heart of the tension between the neo-cons and the realists today. From 1860 until 1933, the Republican Party dominated American politics. This was a period of the rapid expansion of national capitalism. The Civil War not only broke the political power of the formerly predominant slave-holding South, it engendered a period of rapid technological innovation alongside the concentration of capital into the first big US corporations. Its ideology was laissez faire, and its practice was expansion, economic and territorial. This resulted rapid industrialization, which led to inevitable conflicts between capitalists and labor. It was no accident, for example, that the military occupation of the South that was Reconstruction was officially ended in the same year, 1877, that the US saw its first wave of nationwide strikes. This open class antagonism lasted all the way into the first year of the FDR administration. The Republican Party was the party of labor suppression but also the party identified with manumission and Reconstruction, and they were centralizers, identifying themselves with Hamiltonian federalism, and they tended to support a strong and activist central government. The Democratic Party was avowedly white supremacist, and identified with the more decentralist South, who had associated the struggle to preserve Slavery with states rights, a more Jeffersonian political tradition. A challenge to both parties erupted in the 1890s with the Populist movement, which in the South even forged a political alliance between Black Republicans and white Populists, called the Fusionists. This movement was violently suppressed in the South by the Democrats, including a virtual coup detat against an elected Fusion government in North Carolina in 1898. This led to the development of an elite political movement of progressive federalists who sought to contain the turbulence of grassroots politics, and to co-opt social movements. These reformers included Franklin Roosevelt. Their philosophy was, in the words of Loren Goldner, to transform politics into management by experts. They set about actually exposing a whole host of social ills, directly reflecting the sectoral consciousness of their emerging base (poor southern whites, western farmers, and northern industrial workers), and offered federal albeit bureaucratized solutions to those problems. This was the policy essence of the New Deal. Its political essence was the bureaucratization (for control) of the Democratic Party in order to inoculate it from undue grassroots pressure. In foreign policy, these technocrats preferred this jujitsu to the karate of the gunboat, too. That didnt mean they were averse to military power projection, but that they were sensitive to the ebb and flow of international power politics and they understood that sometimes you bend so you dont break. In todays inescapably international, interdependent world, isolationism is no longer an option. But the predisposition of the federalist technocrats like Brzezinski is to move through the room without breaking the china (no pun intended). There is still a strong appreciation of the danger lurking in the grassroots. This is the danger that they believe the neo-cons who have adopted Jeffersonian decentralism for their racist domestic agendas are ignoring. On that account, they may be right.

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At any rate, the technocratic tradition was inherited by Harry Truman after the war, where it was combined with the emerging Cold War -- in Iran. Shah Pahlavi became the unquestioned autocrat of Iran after the Soviet withdrawal in 1946. He presided over two nations: one the semi-feudal countryside, where the Majlis - the big landowners -- subjected millions of peasants, and the other in the city, where the oil business was articulating its own industrial proletariat. In 1949, Mao Zedong stunned the world when his Peoples War succeeded in seizing state power over the most populous nation in the world, even in the face of massive US assistance to Maos nemesis, Chiang Kai-shek. Trumans advisors noted that the system and conditions that engendered the Chinese Revolution were similar in many respects to the situation in Iran, and that Iranian industrial workers were filling the ranks of the Tudeh, the new Iranian Communist party. They advised -- being veteran technocrat federalists -- assistance for modernization and land reform. But Truman was so spellbound by the phenomenon in China that he staggered into a proxy war with the Chinese on the Korean peninsula only a year later. The Iranians were in fact watching China, and the resistance to the Shah accelerated. There were two powerful sectors who opposed him: the Majli, who controlled the parliament, and who werent keen on the land reform program being suggested by the United States, and the industrial workers, who also saw Pahlavi as an Anglo-American puppet. It was this theme, that Pahlavi was a puppet of the US, which resonated with both sectors, and so the resistance developed as had the Chinese Revolution as a struggle for national independence. The National Front that developed was led by the Majli, Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1951, under great grassroots pressure, the Shah appointed Mossadegh prime minister. Mossadegh was a good choice from the perspective of the peasants as well, because while he opposed US influence as the rest of the xenophobic Majli did he supported land reform, which he said could be financed, including paying off the Majli, with oil revenues. For the Americans and for the British, this raised the specter of nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They were right. He signed the expropriation order in March, 1951. This action -- wildly popular in Iran -- ignited a prairie fire of grassroots activity then that threatened to become revolutionary. When the next US president, Dwight Eisenhower, managed to cut free the Korean anchor around the US neck, it was 1953, and his CIA Director, the infamous Allen Dulles, told him, If Iran succumbs to the Communists, there is little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the worlds oil reserves, will fall under Communist control. This fear was confirmed in its own self-fulfilling way, when the US engineered a trade embargo against Iran and force Mossadegh to sign a trade agreement that same year with the only nation that had the inclination or ability to violate the embargo the Soviet Union. A month later, the Shah abdicated. By August, with substantial aid and direction from the CIA, monarchists in the Iranian army staged a coup, and the Shah was restored. Dulles himself a crafty technocrat was running policy in Iran by then, and he badgered Eisenhower to push Pahlavi into social reforms as soon as possible to preclude another build-up of grassroots resistance. Eisenhower, however, dithered with studies and

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policy pronouncements, kept the money flowing to Pahlavi, and then turned the whole mess over to John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was aggressive to the point of angering Pahlavi, but by 1963 he prevailed on Pahlavi to begin a process of modernization and reform. This was a top-down program of reform called the White (as opposed to Red) Revolution. Land reform was implemented, and there was massive improvement in health and (secular, male/female) universal education. This led to ten years of relative stability, that blunted the nationalist charges of US puppet that continued to come from the Tudeh on the left, and from the anti-modernization clerics on the right, one of whom was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Richard Nixon took office in 1968, inheriting the hair-raising collapse of the US Treasury Departments gold pool and the un-winnable war in Vietnam that had caused it. In 1969, the Nixon administration started hinting to key allies that US oil production was about to peak then go into irreversible decline. This, and the destruction of the gold pool, had everyones thinking caps on, and the one weapon that the US had in its economic arsenal was the-dollar-as-international-currency. There is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests the Nixon administration then colluded with Saudi Arabia and Iran in the so-called Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. The Nixon administration had completed is abandonment of gold and fixed exchange rates, allowing a 20% devaluation of the dollar that hit European and Japanese creditors in the solar plexus. The Nixon administration was also facing the growing threat of autarkic national liberation movements in Latin America (Chile was overthrown that same year by the Nixon administration.) and Africa. Since oil payments were denominated in dollars, the jump in the price of oil from the embargo was a destabilizing jump in the price for Europe, Japan, Africa, and Latin America. The US, on the other hand, owned the printing press for dollars. By recycling the oil crisis, via excess petrodollars passing through Wall Street, then through these peripheral regions, the US effectively killed several birds with one stone. The US dumped 20% of its debt to rich creditors, and indebted poor countries to itself with the glut of loaned-out petrodollars. By all accounts, Nixons relationship with Pahlavi was very warm. They had been personal friends since Nixon was Eisenhowers vice president. William Safire, Nixons former speech-writer, once stated that Pahlavi was Nixons favorite head of state. Nixon offered to sell Pahlavis regime any weapon they needed, short of nuclear. That offer was not rescinded during the ostensibly hostile oil embargo in 1973-4, and Iran continued to make outlandish weapons procurements from the US. Those procurements coincided with the jump in oil prices, and the combination completely destabilized Pahlavis Iran. Lightening inflation ensued, land foreclosure skyrocketed, and with it mass migration into the cities, followed by housing shortages, compounded by inadequate urban infrastructure, and a re-expanding chasm between the richest and poorest. Grassroots agitation, from almost every sector now, resumed. Then in 1978, in neighboring Afghanistan, the Washington-approved strong man Mohammed Daoud Khan began arresting the leaders of the influential Peoples Democratic Party, a pro-Soviet political formation that has substantial support within the Afghan army. As it turns out, this was an action that Washington was provoking in order to provoke a Soviet response to trap them in a guerrilla struggle in Afghanistan. The author of this plot was none other than arch-realist/technocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carters national security advisor. It worked.

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The leftist officers organized a coup against Daoud and shot him, establishing a secular socialist government. The CIA began funneling support to right-wing clerical opponents of the regime inside and outside Afghanistan, and the Soviets were eventually drawn into a protracted and destructive military occupation of Afghanistan. As part of this fight against the left, the Shah in neighboring Iran increased his suppression of left secular forces inside Iran, driving them back into a tactical alliance with Irans own clerical right-wing, and this alliance poured into the streets in 1978 creating the security crisis on top of the existing economic and political crisis that broke Pahlavis power. Carters Ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, tried to warn the administration of the impending revolution. A contingency plan was even organized for a US military takeover of Iran that was later rejected as unlikely to succeed. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown, the clerical forces had suppressed the secular left, and fifty-two Americans were taken hostage inside the US Embassy in Tehran. For the US, this was an utter debacle, and it led to Jimmy Carters defeat in the 1980 election. When the Reagan administration took power, they turned to the one leader in the region who might be able to confront Persian-clerical Iran, Iraqs Arab secular nationalist, Saddam Hussein, even as the administration was colluding behind the scenes with Iran to finance its illegal war in Nicaragua by selling weapons to Khomeinis regime. Massively supported by the US, Saddams Iraq inaugurated a grueling eight-year, high-attrition border war with Iran that chewed up around a million human beings. On the other side of Iran, in Afghanistan, the US was providing massive material and training support to the Sunni political-Islamists who would eventually constitute the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the so-called network associated with Osama bin Laden. This element operated out of Pakistan for more than a decade, and came to exert a tremendous social and political influence on large sectors of Pakistan, including its intelligence service and military. This fjord-navigating foreign policy kept at least one partner stable within the region, tacking back and forth between the tides and currents, and developing a partnership with Zionist Israel as a surrogate US military in the region. This policy has maintained the US grip on the region for 60 years. But the chickens had to come home to roost eventually, which they did with a terrible vengeance in September 2001 not from Iran, and not from Iraq, but from Saudi Arabia and tangentially from Pakistan in response to the basing of military troops in Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest sites in Islam. The general outcry in reaction to 9/11 was for retaliation, with very little understanding of the provocations and machinations that led to the attacks, and less notice still that the US actually withdrew its troops from Saudi Arabia shortly after 9/11, clearly recognizing that the Wahabbist grievance, as stated, was the provocation, and not some generalized hatred of freedom and democracy. It was this recognition, that there was a real threat growing in the streets of places like Riyadh, as political Islam had come to give voice to mass grievances in the place of the very nationalism that Islamism had been deployed to crush, that gave the sense of urgency to the entire US ruling class to re-establish control over this key strategic region. The only argument was over the method, which does not speak to the issue of whether it was or is possible to contain the social crisis in Southwest Asia. The Bush doctrine in the region is certainly one powered by immense hubris and the apparent belief that the US can simply impose its will directly, and thereby restructure by dint of arms the architecture of the global economy. 86

This is, in the eyes of the realist-technocrats, a grave miscalculation. Whether they technocrats have an alternative solution to the underlying crisis that is driving this drive to conquer Southwest Asia is an open question. But their fears may be very well founded. The system is unique monetary-military imperialism of the US is tottering with contradictions, and the only question is where and when the catalyst will come that tips it over. If the military failure in Iraq caused consternation, talk of attacking Iran is setting off alarm bells for some. Money, Money, Money Rosa Luxemburg and Geography Imperialism is the expression of the political accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. -Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 1913 Rosa Luxemburg, as unfortunately happens all too often with notable women in history, has been badly overlooked. She is remembered mostly as a leftist leader in Poland and Germany who was the victim of political assassination, and for her sharp debates with Lenin. But in her 470-page opus, The Accumulation of Capital, she made a significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of imperialism, one that has been incorporated into world system theory and into feminist critiques of political economy. Luxemburg said that capitalism, an economic system based on the self-expansion of monetary value for a propertied class, has never functioned nor can it ever function without external, non-capitalist inputs. The expansion of British capitalism, for example, could not have happened without colonization and exploitation of more primitive economies, or without direct military plunder of colonized people and resources. The same applies to American capitalism that was built up first using non-waged (slave) labor, and military expansion into indigenous lands. Marx himself recognized this as an essential dynamic for the build-up of modern capitalism in Volume I of Capital, where he stated: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c." Luxemburgs point is that this reliance on primitive accumulation is a constant within developed capitalism and that it is magnified as capitalism generalizes into various forms of imperialism.

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Even today, this is demonstrably true. Because geography has divided the industrial capitalist centers from the subjugated peripheries, we can easily delude ourselves that our bustling, SUV-infested highways, our shopping malls crammed with luxury commodities, and our shiny grocery warehouses bursting with food are natural features of a superior social system. We do not see the exhausted legions of foreigners many living in pre-industrial, pre-capitalist societies or their exhausted lands, which make this licentiousness possible. But now we have arrived in a historical moment where one key and irreplaceable resource, a resource that forms the energetic foundation of the global system, has opened a window on the international interdependence petroleum. Maria Mies paraphrased Luxemburgs analysis in her own 1986 work, Patriarchy and Accumulation of a World Scale Women in the International Division of Labor, like this: [Luxemburg] had come to the conclusion that Marxs model of accumulation was based on the assumption that capitalism was a closed system where there were only wage laborers and capitalists. [She] showed that historically such a system had never existed, that capitalism had always needed what she called non-capitalist milieux and strata for the extension of labour force, resources, and above all the extension of markets. These non-capitalist milieux and strata were initially the peasants and artisans with their natural economy, later the colonies. Colonialism for Rosa Luxemburg is therefore not only the last stage of capitalism [as Lenin claimed], but its constant necessary condition. In other words, without colonies capital accumulation or extended reproduction of capital would come to a stop. Robert Biel in The New Imperialism Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations (2000) said that the general problem raised by Luxemburgs contribution to imperialism theory [is the question] is capital accumulation renewing itself or merely exhausting its own basis? Peak oil is a dramatic answer to this question, and it is central to the occupation of Iraq and the saber-rattling at Iran, no matter how many sophisticates attempt to portray petroleum as secondary or pass. When we speak of capital in this way, we are talking about money. So it seems important at this juncture to examine money itself, because what we dont think about with regard to money may contain the key to a number of riddles. What is money? When you think about it, this is not easy to answer. We know it when we see it, but do we really know how it works? Why do people accept it as a universal equivalent of exchange? Are all moneys really universal? What does it really represent? On the international exchange today, I can get around 11.4 pesos for one US dollar. So if I go to Wal-Mart down the road to pick up a DVD of Jaws for $9.44, thats $10.13 with tax, why wont they accept 116 Mexican pesos? Not only will they not accept it, my bank wont take them either. But when I was in Xalapa, Mexico three years ago, I had no problem getting Mexican merchants and bankers to accept or exchange dollars on the spot. Why is that?

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The first time I was in Haiti, I could get 15 gourdes for one US dollar. That same dollar now gets me about 48 gourdes. This may seem like a great deal, except that many things in Haiti are being shipped there from the US -- especially the main food, rice. For Haitians, this is a disaster, because prices went up without pay going up, when they had to pay 48 gourdes for a dollars worth of rice instead of 15 gourdes. On the other hand, if I were to exchange US dollars for Euros today, Id get fewer Euros than I did two years ago. There are two points to be made here. (1) The value of money is not fixed. It fluctuates. (2) Some money is more universal than others. If a hypothetical country lives in a bubble, isolated from all other countries, in a money economy, this country has a central bank that is run by the government. That central bank says how much money to print, controls interests rates, and so on. Many bankers like to talk about a free market, but they know that this is complete nonsense, because without a regulated market a lot of bad things happen. really quickly. And who decides what passes for legitimate money, after all? The government needs to begin by making that decision, then controlling the supply of money by exercising a monopoly over the printing presses. If not, they have no means of collecting taxes unless they want to start accepting chickens, sacks of flour, wool sweaters, free haircuts, and such. In this fictional isolated country, the central bank tries to measure the total value of all commodities circulating in the economy and to maintain around the same value in circulating money with a little extra to extend credit for something called growth. If the central bank prints too much money, then prices go up (inflation). This might not seem like a big deal if wages go up, too. But lenders (banks, loan-sharking companies, etc.) have an issue with this, because it eats into the buying power of the interest they collect on debts. If the government prints too little money, prices fall (deflation), which sounds like a good deal until you think about owing money. If you owe $10,000 in debts, and suddenly $10,000 buys twice as much as it did before you incurred the debts, your debts represent a greater liability against your buying power. In the United States right now, with the average household debt at nearly $20,000, this would be seriously bad news. It wouldnt bother me much because I had someone do the numbers for me recently, and my net worth is minus $15. I can eat that without much pain. But a lot of people, when they look at their debt liabilities, have much scarier minuses. Its scary, because with deflation, wages drop through the floor, people get laid off en masse, but all those debts still stand at the same numerical value not purchasing power value. The problem is there is no such fictional Bubble-Country. We live it a world with a lot of countries that are grossly unequal. Heres the point on printing money. There is one country right now that prints all the money it wants to, and everyone else in the world will accept this money for all the stuff they make, even though they know very well its not fair. Its the United States. The standard of living that is being maintained right now in the United States is being maintained because we can print all that money and because other countries are forced to accept it regardless of how few commodities we actually produce. The main commodity we produce is dollars. Other countries produce things to get dollars. (See US Dollar Hegemony has got to go, by Henry C. K. Liu, Asia Times, April 11, 2002). Its a scam of the first order, and if it quits functioning, the dollar will fall to its natural market value, and all you Visa shoppers and home mortgage equity borrowers will be 89

joining the legions of the depressingly destitute in a modern-day version of the Dust Bowl migrations. So how does this work? Why does the US dollar continue to soar around like a turkey buzzard on an Appalachian updraft, instead of falling to the ground like a homesick brick the way the market says its supposed to when you are running the printing presses at the velocity of a meth lab? Okay, well get to that. Lets return for a moment to what money is. It used to be any old thing people would accept as a universal exchange equivalent, but an actual thing. Pretty shells, or pastry dough, or gold it doesnt matter. People just have to agree to accept it for a lot of other things. Gold and silver were favorites. But then it became paper money (more portable, for one thing), that supposedly you could cash in at the central bank for silver or gold, which made it sort of a government check against precious metal. Then we slipped into monetary faith by degrees, when money was only partly redeemable for gold, then in 1971, in the US, for reasons Ill touch on later, they said to hell with it, well just issue paper without the gold backing. Well, by then people were used to it, and everyone had a stake in the stuff being accepted, and paper fiat money (that means without anything behind it but faith in the system, backed up by the fact that you had to have it to pay your taxes) stuck. Nowadays, you dont even need to handle paper. You can send virtual money around with computers. So, okay, what is this money really? Its an entitlement. Its a claim on someone else. But on what exactly? This is where radical political economists can help us out. They say its an entitlement to your energy your work-energy, that is. Money is an entitlement to someone elses labor. We dont see it that way, because when I buy the Jaws DVD I dont head over to Wal-Mart thinking Im going to use this money to lay claim to the expended energy of the people who work in the DVD factory or the residuals due to the people who worked to make the movie or to the truck driver that delivered the DVDs, etc., etc., etc. Nobody does that. We just go buy the DVD. But the monetary value of that DVD is based on all the energy that was expended to get it to the rack at Wal-Mart. Since we dont see the work being done, from rendering silicon for chips to packing those little plastic containers into cardboard boxes, we tend not to think about it, so we also fail to think about money being this claim, this entitlement. Think about it. No one gave you the money. You had to go someplace you didnt want to be for eight hours every day, put up with some dim-witted bosss bullshit, and deal with people you wouldnt give the time of day otherwise, just to get paid the money. That money claimed you. It entitled the boss to your energy and time. At a deeper level, and more importantly, it entitled your boss to your obedience. This is the whole system, really. People who have the inside skinny on accumulating money (by owning everything) then assert their claims by working the shit out of all the rest of us so they can have wild cocaine orgies, buy yachts, collect million dollar horses, or ride around in limos different things float their boats, but you get the picture. They play, and we serve. Because we need the money. Yet there is a dimension to all this that goes beyond the rich and the not-so-rich in one place. Its the geographical dimension. There is an international division that is even sharper than what most of us in the industrialized metropolis ever realize. 90

Just like Rosa Luxemburg said, there are a few rich countries that suck the labor and resources out of a lot of poor countries. But the rich countries cant get away with this unless at least most of their own population is complacent. So to get this political complacency, they allow key fractions of their own working people to have some nice things a ranch house, a line of credit to buy that useless, gas-guzzling SUV, cheese sticks in individual wrappers, liquor, televisions, and DVDs. The worst of these rich countries is the United States, where statistics show that we are on average the most wasteful, expensive individuals in the world. We have plenty of poor people, but on average we use more land per capita to feed ourselves, consume more water per capita, burn up more fossil fuel, make more trash, and consume more nonessential luxury crap than any society in history. It has made many of us soft and stupid, which is why we dont realize that we couldnt do that right now if we didnt have monetary printing presses and the most expensive, unwieldy, and lethal military on the planet. And the two -- printing press and the military -- are inseparable. Lose one, and the whole party comes to a screeching halt. Well come back to that, too. Since one countrys currency can now change its value relative to other currencies on any given day, it has led to gambling on the price of money. When I was in El Salvador in 1985, the official exchange rate was 4 colones to $1 US. But the rate in the street the black market changed almost hourly. Rich Salvadorans could not use colones to pay their big international debts. They had to have dollars, the recognized international currency. So ever so often there would be a bidding war for dollars that spilled into the street where the mini-mafiosi had hundreds of moneyexchangers. When that happened, if you got out there fast (Bring your firearm!), you might get a temporary rate of ten or eleven to one, so you could cash out $5,000 for 50,000 colones, then go to the bank that same day and get $12,500. Thats a sort of microscopic version of currency speculation on the world market. Good deal, huh? But it doesnt last. Eventually, the banks get wind and the official rate has to be changed to reflect the reality of this speculative market. The colone or (pick you currency) gets devalued. Now lets pump up this scenario. Lets say you are a huge securities account of pooled funds from a lot of ultra-rich bastards, who can lord over mere bank directors like peons, and you can mobilize as much credit in one day as, say, the GDP of California. Lets also say that you dont like Country X because they havent gone along with your program. Country Xs currency is the gimcrack. It exchanges for ten to the dollar. Your giant account -- called a hedge fund -- pulls together $10-12 billion through its credit resources and uses intermediaries to begin buying up gimcracks. With so many gimcracks being bought up, the gimcracks begin to exchange more dear, first at nine to one, then at eight to one, right up to five to one. The herd mentality takes over in the Big Casino, and everyone wants to get in on the action kind of like everyone did during the dot-com boom right before they all lost their asses. Meanwhile, these intermediaries that have been intentionally heating up the market for gimcracks on behalf of the hedge fund they start cashing out. They cash out fast, turning gimcracks into dollars as quick as they can, at five to one (remember, they bought in at ten and nine) then six to one because when people see how many are being sold, 91

the herd stampedes the other way then eight to one by now the hedge fund is out, richer by a fair piece, but the gimcrack is in stampede-over-the-cliff mode, and wont hit bottom until it is at twenty to one, meaning the entire Country X just suffered a 50% devaluation. If you were making 10 gimcracks an hour in your local sweatshop yesterday, you are making 10 gimcracks an hour today except every price in the country is being jacked up 50% to protect the merchants bottom line. This is a speculative attack. It is what caused the 1998 Asian meltdown. Not bad management. Not cronyism. Not loose loan policies. It was done on purpose, by the Clinton administration, on the orders of Commerce Secretary Robert Rubin, and carried out by giant hedge funds from the finance-capital sector of the USA. Among the attackers was George Soros, the favorite of many liberal NGOs in the US, and a key supporter of the Kerry campaign. If youd like to read about it, pick up Peter Gowans The Globalization Gamble The Dollar-Wall Street Regime and its Consequences. Gowan explained how these hedge funds became weapons of US statecraft. Hedge Funds is a euphemism: these are speculator organizations for making money through the buying ad selling of securities on their own account to exploit price movements over time and price differences between markets. The biggest of these hedge funds are not marginal speculators they are nor banks but partnerships, often registered offshore for taxdodging purposes. The biggest of the banks then lend huge sums of money to what are, in effect, their creations [the hedge funds], in order that the hedge funds can play the markets with truly enormous resources. This scale of resources is vitally important because it enables the speculator to shift prices in the market in the direction he wants the prices to move in through the sheer scale of funds There is no doubt whatever that the hedge funds were the driving force of the attack first on the Thai baht, then on other regional currencies and the Hong Kong stock market. The first hedge fund assault on the baht occurred in May 1997, one month after the Clinton administration launched its campaign demanding that Thailand and Indonesia open their financial sectors fully to US financial operators The Asian crisis began in Thailand in July 1997. The next economy to fall was Indonesia. But the really decisive financial crisis was that to South Korea. It was the South Korean crisis which ended the temporary stabilization of Indonesia and which finally brought complete collapse there. And the South Korean crisis was responsible for plunging the whole region into slump. (Gowan also noted that during the Reagan administration, since the US was running a trade deficit, the expansion of the military, especially new military hardware, meant that the US state was acting as a surrogate export market for the industrial sector. This is at least part of the calculation of our present-day neo-cons for preserving the wealth of their industrial-capital cronies in a time of indeterminate war.) How does a country protect itself from such a speculative attack? Thats a very good question. What they do is have the central bank hold enough assets denominated in 92

the most internationally recognized currency (the US dollar), so in an emergency, they can use those dollars to buy up their own currency and pull it out of the line of fire of the speculators. A significant portion of any countrys reserve currency needs to be denominated in dollars, then, as a shield against this kind of assault. So most countries central banks have collected the most available dollardenominated asset they can get their hands on -- treasury bills. These are like Savings Bonds. They are a loan to the US government, which the US government will pay back with a variable interest rate after maturity. So in effect, the reserve currency in most central banks in the world to protect the local currency from an attack is US dollars. Every country, therefore, now has a vested interest in ensuring that there is no speculative run on the dollar -- even if by market standards it deserves to be dumped like a dirty diaper -because devaluation of the dollar would knock the stuffing out of their very own currency reserves. Thats some catch, that Catch-22. Not only that, the US engineered it all the way backing the early 70s, while it was abandoning gold-backing and fixed currency exchange rates that prevented speculative attacks, for the major oil producing nations to invest all their surplus money in dollardenominated assets too, and thereby made sure that everyone around the world who had to pay for oil had to pay in dollars. One of the key factors in the thinking of the Saudis, Kuwaitis, United Arab Emirates, et al, was that there was only one country around who could guarantee and monopolize the military security of the major sea lanes leading out of the Persian Gulf. Guess who? Heres the big problem. There are now so many countries holding so many US treasury bonds that the US is categorically not capable of paying them all off. Thats right. If everyone we owe money to called in their debts, Uncle Sam would be bankrupt. So no one is going to do that, because if Uncle Sam goes bankrupt, what will happen to all those treasury notes in our central banks? The US can now borrow from as many people as it wants, and the debt turns into further security against anyone calling in the debts. Michael Hudson, the financial historian who authored Super Imperialism The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, explained in a 2003 interview: The U.S. has said it can't pay back its dollar debts and doesn't intend to. As an alternative, it has proposed funding the US dollar overhang into the world monetary system. Other countries would get IMF credit equal to their dollar holdings, but these holdings no longer would be US Treasury obligations. The US would wipe its debt to foreign central banks off the hook. This would mean that it would have got all the balance-of-payments deficits for the past 32 years for free, with no quid pro quo. The US has been proposing this for 30 years whenever Europe raises the issue of payment for its dollar holdings. American diplomats have said that they won't allow central banks to use their dollars to buy US corporations, for instance. When OPEC countries proposed this after 1973, the US Treasury reportedly informed them that this would be considered an act of war. 93

Meanwhile, people still have to have dollars to pay their international debts. Where do you get dollars? From the United States, of course. So the treasury note system has other countries locked in at the central banks, and the need to pay off bigger and bigger external debts -- in dollars -- forces the majority or poor countries to convert their entire economies away from local development -- like the old import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy (itself erroneous) -- into export commodity platforms oriented to the US. The US makes dollars; everyone else makes things to get dollars. The two pillars of the US imperial edifice are monetary and military. And the development of this unique ability was closely related to the unique geographical position of the United States, outside the lethal circumference of European wars. Todays Imperialism Uniquely American How credit and debt put the United States on top The United States is dominant in the world, materially dominant, and not merely financially dominant. But the theories of Hilferding, Hobson, and Lenin on imperialism do not accurately describe the actual character of US domination unless we selectively censor a lot of information -- as certain sectors of the left have been wont to do. From the very beginning, the Hilferding-Hobson-Lenin theses centered on the needs of monopoly capital as the driving force that led to inter-imperialist rivalry, and to the First World War. These theses held true for Europe and the stage of imperialism that they witnessed. But as Michael Hudson exhaustively documents in Super Imperialism, the United States began in the First World War by exploiting this rivalry itself to gain advantage, and the predominant actor was not monopoly capital, but the US state. While there is no doubt that the state was acting on behalf of its own capitalists, it was not doing so in a largely reactive way but in a leadership role. The US did so first in the role of national creditor, then -- even more surprisingly -in the role of national debtor. While the US had employed direct conquest and domination in its own hemisphere, it was not drawn into the inter-imperialist rivalry that sparked WWI. So the US did not find itself predominantly exporting capital to its colonies via private institutions, but exporting it to the advanced capitalist states, particularly Great Britain, as loans for its war with the Germans and Ottomans, loans approved and guaranteed but by the United States government. The United States stayed out of the war until it became likely that without US intervention, the Allies would lose and thereby lose its loan repayments. Once the war was over, Great Britain and France were heavily indebted, and the US -- far from being the benevolent post-war ally -- behaved much like any Brooklyn loan shark, bleeding its former allies so severely that they in turn wrecked the post-war German economy with reparations to assist the allies in their debts. This led directly to the rise of Hitler fascism and the Second World War. Whereupon, the US began its participation, again, not as a fellow combatant, but as a creditor to the other allies. It is very clear now that Franklin Roosevelt developed financial designs on the colonies of the British Empire, and that he maneuvered throughout the war to let others -- particularly the Soviet Union, but also England and France -- take the 94

brunt of Hitlers aggression to weaken them, while he built up the geographically warimmune US industrial base, and positioned the US to again be a post-war creditor and the new super-power. It is a demonstrable fact that England has been a satellite of the United States ever since the First World War, and this accounts today for the unsavory affinity of Tony Blairs lips for George W. Bushs faux-cowboy ass. Tony will eagerly jump aboard the bandwagon to attack Iran soon if there is any attack at all, which I doubt. Britain was the principle (but not only) target of US post-war loan-sharking in the 20s and 30s. Prior to the 1929 crash, the US bled the British Empire like a financial vampire, driven more by an archaic bankers ruthlessness than any prescient self-interest. In fact, the US state had no idea at the time that they were becoming the principle cause of what would become the worlds most destructive war only two decades down the pike. After the speculative crash in 1929, with the US in the worst economic doldrums it had ever experienced, and with significant sectors of the US working class looking with great interest at Russias example from 1917, Franklin Roosevelt was elected the 33rd President of the United States in 1933, with a mandate to take extraordinary measures ostensibly to relive the suffering of the American working class masses, but more importantly from the point of view of US elites to take the increasingly revolutionary edge off of their agitations. Roosevelt then became the first president to abandon the gold standard and conduct a cold-blooded strategic devaluation of the US currency as a weapon against its putative allies in Europe. This was a policy of deliberate inflation domestically to raise prices as part of his domestic pre-Keynesian overhaul, but it further battered the European exporters, especially Britain, who needed to export to the US in order to acquire the dollars to pay their compounding WWI debts. This was the first intentional foray into state-initiated economic warfare using currency as a weapon, and it displayed just a glimmer of understanding that in state-tostate economic competition, the central banks would become the primary battlefield. In the competition between private capitals, the state would eventually become the referee to ensure the health of the whole, and one state would dominate the general direction of global capital accumulation. This was only a glimmer then. The Law of Unintended Consequences caused WWII, and hit the US with an even deeper economic crisis. The combined refusal of the US to negotiate new terms with the Europeans for repayment of war debts and the strategic devaluation of the gold-free dollar led to a series of competitive devaluations of European national currencies a destructive race to the bottom that ended up hitting the United States like a tsunami. Consistent with Luxemburg and later world system theorists, this period of economic disaster in the capitalist metropoles loosened the exploitative grip on the underdeveloped periphery. Andrew McKillop wrote that: Through 1929-35 or 1929-36 in some countries of the civilized world there were unremitting falls of activity in key sectors. The uncivilized world was however less than concerned by the event ... it gained. (A. Gunder Frank, S. Amin and suchlike will give you the related and unrelated sequences of economic change governing metropole-colony relations). Simple facts and figures show considerable economic growth in the colonial South of the 1929-39 period. 95

This strengthened many of the colonies even as their colonial ruler-states were being weakened, and contributed to the creation of conditions that would lead to the wave of national liberation movements that were folded into the Cold War dynamic later on. This was unanticipated by the US, even as its assault on the British was coldly calculated. The intent was never to take over as British (or other) surrogates in the colonies, but to replace the Sterling as the world reserve currency, bringing not only the peripheral south under its sway, but Europe itself, beginning with Great Britain. Michael Hudson writes: It would be false to say that the United States provoked World War II out of malice or out of knowledge of the results of insisting on repayment of its war debts by a world utterly unable to repay them intolerable burdens that the United States imposed on its allies of World War I and, through them, on Germany. Every US administration from 1917 through the Roosevelt era employed the strategy of compelling repayment of these war debts, above all Britains. The effect was to splinter Europe so that the continent was laid open politically as a possible province of the United States. Private finance capital could not have achieved that end [but] the world tumbled into a depression. Not only did the United States not escape the Great Depression, it became the principle sufferer from a collapse of its own creating The first great foray of U.S. governmental finance capital into world power politics thus ended in ignominious failure, and ultimately in a war dimensions vaster even than World War I. Roosevelt was a determined man, and after implementing heroic Keynesian measures to ensure the political stability of the United States, he turned the lemon into lemonade through his carefully calculated commitments of the US to World War II. The Lend-Lease Act, by which the US supported the Allies without troops in the Second Word War for almost two years before it intentionally provoked the Japanese into the attack on Pearl Harbor, was an instrument that just as intentionally broke down the British Empire with debt for the purpose of dissolving the Imperial Preference -- a set of relaxed trade rules within the British Empire -- in the commonwealth. This set the stage for the post-war displacement of the Sterling as the global reserve currency by the dollar. The intent was never to destroy the British, any more than it was to replace the direct European colonial rule that World War II would mortally wound. It was to bring Europe and ascendant Asia under the sway of the United States as sub-imperial powers in a new global hierarchy that would extend the influence of the US state beyond anything ever yet imagined by former empires -- in a qualitatively new way. The British were subsumed by the United States into the financial pole of capital, and were eventually reduced to a US financial satellite on the border of Europe. This goes a long way toward explaining the seemingly inexplicable subservience of successive British governments in toadying to the US -- even in harebrained military adventures like the current Iraq quagmire. UK has now been transformed into a financial and military appendage of the US state. Mark Jones (1999): 96

The British working class has been restructured out of its birthright and out of its collective identity. The country is now a fiefdom of [US] international finance capital, its working class little more than servitors of the City [of London a banking consortium], which has now consolidated its national hegemony while totally internationalising itself. The country now exists as an adjunct of the City. Apart from finance capital, Britain's most successful trades are the Intelligence Service, the Armed Forces and the arms industryFor this reason, the world slump which is now in its early stages will have peculiarly sharp social effects in Britain. Britain's role as the world's largest financial offshore island, the world's leading money-launderer (as much as $200bn of narcodollars and dirty money in some years is washed in the City's giant laundry), its selfappointed segregation from Europe and refusal to participate in EMU (economic and monetary union) means that the fate of sterling, pummeled between the euro and the dollar, will likely be grisly... The disproportionate weight of banking, finance and transnational corporate capital in the British economy means that the effects of crisis in these sectors will spread with lightning speed and devastating effect through what passes for the specifically-national economy. Gowan noted how the US actually used the City of London to break down the post-war Bretton Woods system after the Vietnam War almost bankrupted the United States. It is true that the Nixon administration was able to exploit a breach in the Bretton Woods system, Gowan writes, that had already existed since the 1950s: the international role of the City of London in financial transactions. For the details of this, see Gowans aforementioned extensive essay. The Nixon Revolution Why the Left is wrong about money for people and not for war From the Civil War until World War I, the US had built up its industry to surpass the British. The period from 1914 until 1939 was a period of continuous and profound crisis, during which the US was maneuvering to expand its influence throughout the world at the expense of the European capitals -- in particular the British. The Roosevelt administration had imposed what Gowan called repressive measures on the private financial pole of capital in order to regain the monetary stability necessary to lay the foundation for a fresh upwave of capital accumulation after the war, using government finance capital in the international arena. Those stabilization measures were codified at Bretton Woods in 1944, where the debilitated Europeans consented to a new global system in which the US would be first among equals, in a system that fixed the dollar to gold and established periodically negotiable but fixed currency exchange rates, precisely to prevent overheated currency speculation, but also to establish dollar seignorage across the planet. (In fact, there was little that resembled equality in the Bretton Woods institutions the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, when the US had a controlling 97

plurality and exclusive veto power.) The fact was not unnoticed that during the run up to and conduct of the war, the US Treasury Department had absorbed the largest pool of gold in history. The United Nations was established at the behest of the United States who had earlier rejected the League of Nations indicating the new US willingness to incorporate multilateralism into its imperial blueprint, and as a politico-diplomatic adjunct to the IMF and World Bank. The Marshall Plan was implemented as a bulwark against the spread of communism, simultaneously a genuine fear among many elites as well as a new form of conflict with which to discipline US satellite states. The Plan also provided the US with viable overseas sub-imperial investment conduits. But there was another dimension to this blueprint, and that was the goal of unchallengeable military superiority, as a way of both backstopping and expanding the newfound US international influence. NATO was organized, and US bases proliferated in Asia, all under the guise of containing Communism, but with the practical result of creating even deeper security dependency for sub-imperial Japan and, using the AngloAmerican bloc, on Germany and the rest of Europe. The two pillars of US power were US government finance capital and the US military -- both direct functions of the state. Contrary to the Hilferding-Hobson-Lenin thesis, the US state -- and not monopoly capital -- was in the drivers seat. It is worth noting here that the US state has driven the system into crisis that would have been avoided though different crises would have appeared if short-term economic interests had been the policy locomotive, i.e., Korea then Vietnam, which led directly to the transformation of military-monetary creditor imperialism to the current system of military-monetary debtor imperialism. In its attempt to fight Communism/extend and consolidate US influence in Asia, the US embarked on two costly wars, one that was fought to a stalemate in Korea, and one that resulted in a shattering and domestically-destabilizing defeat in Vietnam. While these two wars undermined the myth of US military invincibility and threw gas on the fires of national liberation movements, they also converted the US from a net creditor in the world into a net debtor. During Vietnam, in particular, with the French leading the way, claims on US gold created a grave danger to the dollar, and the vigorous post-Marshall Plan economies of Germany and Japan had converted the US from a net exporter into a net importer. The combination of both a debt and a trade-deficit came to head under the Nixon administration. This became a new nodal point in US post-war imperialism, and it decisively ended the post-WWII upwave of domestic prosperity. In one of the boldest and most brilliant political moves of the century, the Nixon administration played chicken with the rest of the world, and unilaterally abandoned Bretton Woods. It simply quit the gold standard and fixed currency exchange rates, in effect daring the rest of the capitalist world to run on the dollar. Nixon calculated that dollar hegemony as a global system was too big to fail for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world backed down. We had now entered the stage of debtor-imperialism. This abandonment of gold and fixed exchange rates decisively lifted the New Deal private financial pole repression regime, and it was followed by a series of strategic devaluations of the dollar that wiped billions of dollars of US foreign debt off the books in Germany and Japan, both of whom had to sit by and fume helplessly. 98

This also set the stage for taking advantage of crises generated by currency speculation for US capitals to penetrate markets throughout the world, using the IMF as a lever with its conditional emergency loans. This technique was pioneered by the Reagan administration in response to the Mexican currency crisis of 1982. Hudsons book, Super Imperialism, describes the US-IMF relation in great detail, and it is strongly recommended for anyone who wants to understand exactly how that relation developed. These IMF structural adjustment programs (SAPs) are in effect a loan-sharking operation of unimaginable magnitude imposed on almost 70 poor nations, and they consolidated dollar hegemony in its present form. The ballooning and essentially unpayable debts of debtor nations (with the US as the sole exception) are denominated in US dollars, and have inexorably grown into larger and larger fractions of the national outlays of peripheral economies. This obligation in the face of a crushing international economic sanction threat to service burgeoning external debts using US dollars is precisely why these national economies are pressured to almost wholly export to the US now the world consumer of last instance leaving local populations to rely more and more on the increasingly stressed household, subsistence agriculture, artisan, and primitive accumulation sectors of their own economies (as Luxemburg said) for plain survival. This debt-leverage system in the periphery augments the Treasury bill extortion of European and Asian sub-imperial centers, and both systems are guaranteed in multiple dimensions by US military power. But this system is itself now exhausted, as was indicated by the Asian meltdowns unintended threat to the US economy and by the dot-com bust of 2000. This same debtliquidity crisis is re-forming now in the US as a real estate bubble that will just as certainly burst. Peter Hudis describes the weakness of debtor-imperialism in his essay, What is new in todays imperialism, News & Letters, November 2003 In the Korean War the U.S. shifted from a creditor to a debtor nation, largely due to military expenditures. The situation became permanent with the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s, the U.S.s debtor status as a net importer of surplus capital has been a central feature of the world economy. U.S. indebtedness has by now reached phenomenal levels. This years U.S. trade deficit is $450 billion. The federal budget deficit is $455 billion. The two add up to 11% of U.S. GDP. This is no sign of strength. It is a sign of WEAKNESS. To finance these enormous deficits the U.S. is forced to tap the resources of foreign capitalists by getting them to buy U.S. treasury bonds and various securities. The U.S. is importing far more than it is exporting and its going deeper and deeper into debt. The U.S. is now more dependent on foreign capital than at any time in the past 50 years. Foreign capitalists now own 46% of all U.S. treasury bonds! . As Hudson said, What is novel about the new state capitalist form of imperialism is that it is the state itself that is siphoning off economic surpluses....What turns this financial key-currency imperialism into a veritable super imperialism is that the privilege of running free deficits belongs to one nation alone. 99

The older theories of imperialism saw private corporations running the system to profit, so that profits by global companies were the measure of how much imperialism was occurring. My point is that the largest form of exploitation, quantitatively speaking, now occurs among governments. Another word for Super Imperialism would be Inter-Governmental imperialism. The United States exploits the rest of the world above all via foreign central banks accumulating dollars. As for your other points, imperialism always has exploited mainly the rich countries, for the same reason that Willy Sutton is said to have robbed banks: That's where the money is. The richest nations are the ones with the most economic surplus to appropriate. That is done not via the repatriation of profits, but by the Treasury-bill standard and the free ride that it gives the United States. In paying attention solely to the machinations of the financial-political dimension of the economy, we are apt to lose sight of the real economy, where actual commodities many of them necessities are produced, and remembering Luxemburg the total social capital is reproduced. It is in the interaction between the political-monetary surface and the material transformation, movement, and consumption of goods that we can understand the contradictory tendencies that lead to crises, and where we can actually describe concretely what those crises are. Loren Goldner has written a number of essays on this, as a self-anointed debtdeflation crisis theorist. Goldner begins by teasing apart the term profit as it is generally used by economists, by which they actually mean return on investment (ROI). More useful, says Goldner, is the Marxian distinction of profit as surplus monetary value extracted from the production, which distinguishes this ROI from interest and ground rent. Economists refer to ROI simply as capitalization, which is one of the reasons they are often incapable of seeing crisis as it approaches. Valorization, superficially the process of making money grow, is the fundamental process that drive the entire (global) capitalist economy. But ground rent and interest are circulatory mechanisms, while only profit can produce the new real inputs to sustain growth. So there must be equilibrium between profit and other ROIs if the system is to remain stable. One problem, however, is that profit is extracted from a labor-base that also constitutes the consumer base, and the expansionary imperative of capital growth periodically creates crises of overproduction. The mainstream economists, still focused on the commodities themselves, call this overcapacity, a glut both of goods and the buildings, machines, etc. etc. (fixed capital plant) that make them. This is the mechanism of crisis in the real economy. This overcapacity is exacerbated by technical innovation in the drive to increase productivity that renders existing facilities uncompetitive or obsolete and no longer capable of producing ROI. So in order to recoup ROI, this overcapacity has to be liquidated. This is always a destructive and painful process (recession and war), for which the dominant class compensates itself by using its political power to increase regressive taxation, enclosing commons, dropping wages, and closing down public services -- in effect, attacking the working class and the peripheries.

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In imperial metropoles, this process can be ameliorated by shunting some of the austerity into the periphery, thereby avoiding political crisis at home. The current attack on European and American working class standards is a good barometer of both the exhaustion of resources in the periphery and the disinclination of peripheral peoples to put up with it any longer. But there is also what Goldner and Gowan refer to as fictitious capital. Valorization, on the surface, means that individual capitalists throw money into investment with the expectation that, over time, it will return to them as expanded money. As long as adequate surplus value [value appropriated from the production process itself] is available to sustain expected rates of return as profit, interest and ground rent, valorization continues. When it is not available, there is crisis, and paper claims to wealth are destroyed or devalued. When a new equilibrium is established between profit, interest, and ground rent on one side, and available surplus value on the other -- whatever the interim cost to society, in depression, war, immiseration, disease, shortened longevity -- a new cycle can begin. On the surface, then, a crisis such as the current one occurs because the totality of existing claims to profit, interest and ground rent cannot be valorized through the existing available surplus value: they are FICTIONS which must be destroyed by devalorization. That is what, in a first approximation, a world financial meltdown entails. We see these fictions fictitious capital today [1998, during the Asian crisis] in the vast non-operating assets of the Japanese banks, the unpayable external debts of Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil; in the suddenly insolvent hedge funds... in the still unliquidated real estate assets in Japan, China, Hong Kong, the U.S., and Europe; in the multi-trillion dollar holdings of U.S. Treasury bills, to a large extent by foreigners, and the servicing of the U.S. government debt, Third World debt, corporate debt, and consumer debt at every level of society. To make the long story short, pumping more and more un-valorizable dollars into the global system has been creating a fictitious bubble for decades: a growing mass of paper claims that are being circulated not primarily in productive investment but in speculation. The dot-com bubble that exploded in 2000 is already re-emerging as a real estate bubble, because the production of un-valorizable dollars continues. The container for all this fictitious value is debt, and the threat as even Greenspan is beginning to acknowledge is no longer inflation (the bugaboo of interest collectors) but deflation. People are beginning to think again about 1929. On the world market, this expansion of dollars is expressed in the metaphor dollar overhang, suggesting correctly that as this mass of overhanging dollars expands it grows more perilously close to breaking off and falling. US imperialism has become paradoxical in that it is a net importer of foreign capital. Aside from the treasury loans that the US wont pay back, what are the two sectors in which the US enjoys industrial dominance, which might be attracting foreign capital?

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Military technology and agriculture, both heavily subsidized by the US state. This is but one dimension of the role of the US military in the world system today. The other is direct. Hudis: No less key is U.S. military might. Capitalists like to avoid risk. They feel there is no safer haven for their capital than the land which aims to rule the world through military prowess. It is here, far more than on the issue of oil, that we can locate the economic basis of the U.S. drive for permanent war. Permanent militarization projects an all-powerful image which acts as a magnet to attract foreign capital. Unlike the Gulf War of 1991, foreign capital has not agreed to DIRECTLY pay for todays Iraq war. However, foreign capital is footing much of the bill through a more circuitous route. The U.S. deficits place added pressure on foreign capitalists to invest their surplus dollars in U.S. treasury bonds, thereby transferring much of wars cost to countries overseas -- including those which opposed the war! Hudis was wrong to suggest that oil is a secondary consideration, but he is right that foreign governments finance the military not the taxpayers of the US. And the basis of the US to extract this imperial tribute -- at least an indispensable aspect of it -- is the globally deployed military power of the US. There is a false dichotomy on the left now about whether the US war in Southwest Asia is about controlling oil or about the US attempting to intimidate the rest of the world with a military demonstration effect. Both theses are true, and both of these goals are in trouble. The deeper reality is that the global economy and therefore the US-dominated accumulation regime is now trying to valorize the total world capital with fewer and fewer wage laborers, even as former capitalist expansion had ballooned the world population well above six billion persons. This is the underlying reality that Goldner pointed to, a crisis of profit. The US as a political power, and US capital as an economic engine, have reached the impasse that was latent within the monetary-military system of debtor-imperialism all along. A restructuring at least as dramatic as the Nixon transformation is not a choice, but a desperate necessity. Thats why concentrating on the neo-con Republicans is a form of self-deception. The Democrats will be equally obliged to tear down the old architecture and replace it with something else, if that is even possible. What the Bush administration is doing, with an able assist from its subaltern, Great Britain, is expanding the role of the military within that model to effect this transformation, and they are doing so -- predictably -- in the most strategically important region in the world. The external financing of US military expenditures forms the basis of US domestic economic stability in the near term. So claiming that money, here understood erroneously as some unchangeable carrier of value independent of the monetary-military world system, can be withdrawn from the US Department of Defense in order to correct the structural social deficiencies at home -- money for people not for war, as the slogan goes -- is a great polemical device that will blow up in the Lefts face, because it wont work. Subtract the military, and within a month bums will be wiping their asses with five 102

dollar bills, and a lot of them will be jobless because their own employment was directly or indirectly connected to the military contracts where the US state was acting as a surrogate export market for the industrial sector. The responsibility of the Left, in my humble opinion, is to educate people, even if we are telling them what they understandably dont want to hear, not manipulate them. The stark fact is, there is no easy way out of the predicament we are in, and there will be no solutions forthcoming from the system that put us there. A doctor does not tell a patient who needs an amputation to prevent dying of gangrene, We can wait a few days, and surely things will get better. If this is to be dealt with in any meaningful way, it means the entire US political and economic establishment will have to be removed, and we will have to commit to at least a whole generation of bottom-up, radical changes in every single facet of our lives. That would merely begin with dumping half the so-called service sector jobs in the entire economy, beginning with prisons and working up, into a massive jobs training program, draconian progressive taxation that limits personal income to $100,000 a year, a minimum wage of $20 an hour with imposed price controls, free universal health care, the expropriation of agribusiness and systematic abandonment of capitalist agriculture, the expropriation of the pharmaceutical companies, the strict rationing of electricity, and the construction of a nationwide public transportation network as a first step to dramatically reducing dependence on fossil fuel. Since self-delusion and denial are at the core of our metropolitan cultural being, however, I have very little confidence that this will happen. Most of us who give a shit are still clinging to the illusion that this is an outcome of the right-wing cabal, and we believe we can solve it through elections. So well be dragged into hell in four-year increments of mystification and false hope. The change will in all probability be imposed on us from the outside. And that will begin with people around the world preparing for armed resistance to local compradors and imperial armies, alongside a massive and unified default on external dollardenominated debts. The armed resistance is already in progress, in Mesopotamia. The Material Basis of Accumulation Why Iraq and now Iran? [R]ather than a historical stage, industrial capitalism should be understood as a functional specialization within a larger field of accumulative strategies. Rosa Luxemburg was probably the first to see the full implications of this. Still today, industrial capitalism is very far from the universal condition of humankind, but rather a privileged activity, the existence of which would be unthinkable without various other modes of transferring surpluses of labor and resources from peripheral sectors to centers of accumulation at different spatial scales. -Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine -- Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, Altamira Press, 2001.

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There is clearly a connection between the current war in Southwest Asia and petroleum, but there is a great deal of confusion about the character of that connection. The easiest error to dispense with is that the US is simply stealing the oil. The US does not need to steal oil. Current international arrangements give the US access to exorbitant quantities of oil at cut-rate prices. US payments for oil, given the US ability to export its crises through petrodollar recycling, are already so low in their net impact on the US economy that oil is virtually an imperial tribute. There is no nation that will refuse to sell oil, moreover, to the biggest consumer market in the world. Another misapprehension is that the war is to protect the dollar denomination of oil from a Euro-challenge. But so long as Europe itself is unwilling to sell the dollar short thereby wiping out billions of dollars of monetary value in their own currency reserves then the Euro can never be more than a satellite currency. Moreover, Europe does not have large oil reserves for reinvestment of Euros. Certainly, other nations are looking to diversify their reserve holdings into a dollar-Euro mix, but that does not resolve in any fundamental way the game of chicken that the US can continue to play with its printing presses. Control over the largest patch of oil, on the other hand, is leverage against all competitors who rely on imported oil. That was always Europe and Japan. And since the 1980s, it is increasingly China and India. Military power is the only card the US has to play in this new Great Game. Forgive the paternalistic analogy that emphasizes the imperial standpoint, but as any parent knows, when we must resort to force with our children, it is an indication that all other measures have failed. TheUS is not expanding its power. It is trying to manage its decline. The violence of that management is a reflection of the depth of the crisis, and the question of how to manage that decline goes to the heart of the struggle developing between the neocons and the technocrats. The leverage that petroleum gives over the rest of the over-developed world, as well as nuclear Russia and industrializing China is absolutely and inescapably logical from a strictly mechanistic, military point of view. This is the reason that Southwest Asia is now the epicenter of world crisis. But there is another aspect to the military solution, and that is that the rest of the world, which -- as key resources demonstrate their geological and thermodynamic limitations -- is competing for this diminishing material base even as it sinks further into geo-economic penury. As the number of human beings actively involved in the process of valorizing the total global capital shrinks, leaving in its wake billions of human beings who are now superfluous as producers or excess as resource consumers to the accumulation process, the old post-war myth of development that was held like a carrot in front of the underdeveloped nations has dissolved. There is now a largely urbanized, largely young, teeming mass around the planet that must -- by the logic of the market -- be expelled and eventually exterminated for the center of the center, the US, to continue to accumulate. Marxs reserve army of labor has grown into a giant mass of superfluous (to the market, except as a drag on accumulation) people. Ecologists now tell us that it would take three additional Earths for the atmosphere alone to support the whole world up being developed to the technological standard of 104

consumption now extant in the United States. Petroleum is only one resource in that hypothetical development, but it is a resource unlike other material resources, because it has trapped within it a concentrated, portable form of energy that is unmatched and unmatchable in the world. It has become the thermodynamic lifeblood of industrial capitalism, and without it the entire system will fall into utter and ruinous collapse. The American ruling class is perfectly aware of this, and they are also aware that their power is ultimately political -- that the ruination of the masses in the United States will lead to an upheaval that could undermine or even end that power. So they are playing a game of retrenchment. This is not the game of the strong, but the game of a desperately weak system. In 1945, the US share of global product was 50%. It is half of that now. The US now imports 60% of its petroleum. The American trade deficit is half a trillion dollars. The federal debt is over $6 trillion, 60% of GDP. In 1980, that figure was $1 trillion, or 33% of GDP. My own hypothesis is not complicated, once the question of dollar hegemony is understood. As the monetary position of US power is continually weakened by its public and private debt overhangs, the existing capital accumulation regime is increasingly obliged to force a change on the world so it will accept yet another restructuring, just as Nixon forced the last restructuring on his reluctant allies. There are two aspects to this enforcement -- the industrialized metropoles (where the money is) and the periphery/semi-periphery, where this mass of superfluous people is now a drag anchor on continued accumulation. This drag, from the standpoint of the accumulation regime, must be systematically cut loose. There is an international class war going on, and one reason we only see the military dimension of it is that we only look at the economic indices. This tells the story of unequal exchange in the realm of money, but it does not explain what is happening in the material substrates of the system, nor does it explain why petroleum in particular is unlike other commodities. This article has briefly described the process of accumulation on the monetary surface, where symbolic fictional value can create turbulence at the interface of monetary value and production -- the bubble phenomenon. I have also alluded to the social relations concealed beneath that surface, alluding to the labor-theories of value pioneered by 19th Century thinkers like David Ricardo and Karl Marx, showing how monetary value is added to products in the transformation from raw material to finished product. I have further alluded, though not explicitly, to the fact that labor in the politically subjugated periphery of the world system trades at a lower rate of monetary exchange than it does in the industrial metropoles -- what some theorists refer to as unequal exchange. In every case, we are dealing with commodities as an output, which ignores the role of hydrocarbons -- particularly oil -- as an input, and not merely an input of raw materials like we get from a quarry or a forest. I am speaking of a thermodynamic input. Alf Hornborg notes that Marxist theories of imperialism, although acutely aware of global exploitation, have strangely circumambulated their own implications for our understanding of industrial technology itself. A factory does not grow out of subterranean ore deposits like a mushroom; it can reproduce itself only by exchanging its output of products for a continuous input of specific substances like fuels and raw materials. If this structure is generalized on a global scale, the secret of industrialism can 105

be seen not so much as a matter of applying increasingly intensive technology to a certain piece of land, as of realizing the industrial products on a global market at exchange rates that guarantee the industrialized sectors a continuous negentropic buildup. The industrial technomass cannot subsist by itself but depends on the existence of nonindustrial sectors where the price of fuels, raw materials, and the labor to extract them is so much lower that such exchange rates can be maintained. Luxemburgs thesis. Hornborg is going a step further here than the Marxists. He is pointing out that industrialism -- inextricable from capitalism as an historical process -- is every bit as much a social relation as Marxian profit. The notion here is that technology is not culturally neutral, but that technology itself represents a socially constructed form of inequality. This is a very different proposition from orthodox Marxism, which has implied that industrial technology might be placed under the control of a non-capitalist politico-economic regime and transformed into an agent of equality. In fact, it is a direct challenge to that idea. He bases that challenge on physical laws, beginning with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Ergo, his use of the arcane term negentropy. Hornborg makes the case that the drawbacks of industrial technology are not circumstantial but intrinsic. Negentropy is shorthand for negative entropy, entropy being the overarching tendency in nature for every process to dissipate order, thermodynamically heat available for doing work. When a human being eats 500 calories concentrated in a banana split, then runs out to do her days work, that 500 calories is dissipated into the air around her as heat, no longer concentrated in a form available for work (moving things). Hornborg is speaking of more than heat, but I will focus on energy because it is central to this discussion and it is a good general analog for the larger process Hornborg describes. Globally hypertrophied capitalism -- imperialism -- is fundamentally characterized by expansion, metaphorically designated growth. Luxemburg pointed out that one nation could not sustain this expansion without exceeding its own borders, because both resources and population were finite. Continuous expansion in a finite world is not possible. This is not an economic law, but a physical one. Economics cannot defy physical laws. Nothing can. While she was concentrating on the materio-economic limits on the expansion of value, Hornborg has turned his attention on the energetic limits of expansion. And instead of the limits imposed by a politico-territorial boundary -- the state -- he is looking at the planetary constraints of the biosphere. When we look at the issue of economic productivity, a term used by economists to denote how much product one can squeeze out of how much time they are paying for from workers, energy inputs are the single most important variable in the massive increase of productive output in the last 200 years. We have already alluded to the problem with technology for capitalists, that it erodes the margin of surplus value that constitutes (by the Marxian definition) profit, and eventually forces them to run all over the planet looking for more destitute workers to accept lower wages. The introduction of fossil energy to the industrial process became an immense force magnifier for production, mobilizing energy for work that massively outstripped the ability of any human or animal. The development of this technology was not outside history. It was developed with growth as the impetus, and thoroughly embedded in the capitalist accumulation process. 106

The first factories were designed expressly to discipline the worker to a rate of output, by subordinating that worker to the machine. When we view industrial technology locally (or sectorally), we see increased output, and as the ability ultimately to appropriate space and time (a very important aspect of class). I jump in my Chevrolet, turn the key, put it in Drive, and I can travel to my friends house 25 miles away in half an hour. Without that technology burning fossil energy that has been concentrated for millions of years, by the way the trip one-way would have taken me all day, and when I got there I would have been too tired to qualify as good company. But viewed globally, we can use this metaphor of growth in an entirely different way, which Hornborg does. Hornborg examines the world system from the point of view of its energetic flows, in much the same way we might examine the growth of an organism. Literally, as indicated above in the banana split example, an organism is a dissipative structure, that is, in the process of reproducing itself is dissipates order -- or thermodynamically, heat. Hornborg looks at highly technological societies -- or industrialized metropoles -- in the same way: as giant concentrations of technomass that require constant inputs to maintain themselves. The primary thermodynamic inputs are hydrocarbons, the primary biomass energy inputs are food for cheap labor (embodying 10 calories of fossil fuel in every calorie of food), and the primary material inputs are raw materials. In tracing the energetic flows, he notes that there is a correlative, inverse relationship between monetary value and negentropy. The oil in the Persian Gulf leaves there with a very high potential for doing work. It flows to one of these giant agglomerations of technomass like New York or Tokyo, where it is then turned into, simultaneously, profit in the productive process and useless dissipated heat. These technomass concentrations only grow by demanding ever-higher and uninterrupted inputs of energy concentrates. One very interesting statistic in this regard, even more stark in its demonstration of international inequality than monetary figures, is the per capita energy consumption of different regions. In gigajoules (Gj), according to a UN report on per capita energy consumption in 2000, world per capita consumption is 60.97 Gj. But North America is 342.91 Gj. compared to Africa, for example, which is a piddling 12.15 Gj. One might attempt to account for that -- in the most disingenuous manner -- by citing the requirement for household heat, if it werent for the fact that Europe and Central Asia, whose heating needs are not dissimilar from North America as an aggregate, has a per capita consumption of 131.89 Gj, with a high level of industrial development. In the US especially, the appropriation of space and time is not merely a luxury, but a survival necessity where an entire urban-industrial infrastructure has now been designed around the spatial sprawl and complete dissociation of residential from productive space based on the private automobile. The typical Malthusian accounts of oil depletion found on websites, like www.dieoff.org and www.peakoil.org, provide important empirical accounts of the perils we face as fossil energy is depleted, but they provide only superficial (and therefore misleading) accounts of the social and political forces that constitute the world system. This empiricism that looks at global population trends and compares them to global fossil energy extractions trends implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) suggests that the train wreck of the end-of-oil is biologically determined -- a direct outgrowth of something called human nature. This can lead the Malthusian perspective into both simplification that 107

obscures the socio-cultural bases of the way we use energy and to some profoundly racist notions that the problem is fundamentally one of brown people reproducing too quickly. Hornborgs method of tracing energy flows demonstrates how the industrial capitalist centers -- these vast technomass concentrations that can actually be seen now from satellites -- suck in order (thermodynamically, fossil energy) from across the planet and draw it into themselves, where it is dissipated in the case of oil liquidating half the worlds economically-extractible supply in just over a century, when it was millions of years in the making. This facilitates the extraction of other orders (raw materials and labor) from other regions, which because they are politically powerless also become the global cesspools for the detritus of industrial capitalism. This is the basis of the environmental justice movement, recognition that this disorder is being shipped away from the rich and onto the poor. Growth accelerates this process, not just of depletion, but of inequality, and it is not correctable so long as there is a growth economy. Contrary to the unsubstantiated fantasies of a handful of alternative energy wonks, the present system categorically cannot carry on as is (as a growth economy -- capitalism) without petroleum. Energy is a real thing, and there is quite simply no replacement for petroleum in energy concentration, portability, and flexibility of application. Not in this biosphere, visions of growing alcoholproducing sugar beets across the whole state of Texas notwithstanding. Industrialism and capitalism are inextricable, and they are a single system that, like an introduced species on an island, will consume the material basis of its own continued existence. Hornborg is describing, by adopting the organism-metaphor of growth, the actual metabolism of the world system. Like a beast that grows ever larger, even as it consumes its own food base, the larger it gets (look at the explosive growth of mega-cities), the faster the general rate of consumption becomes just to sustain it. The consumer, however, is not exclusively, or even predominantly, the human organisms that populate these urban centers. Technomass -- modern machinery and structure -- is itself a consumer of thermodynamic order and an exporter of thermodynamic disorder. This is the material basis of the inevitable conflict, for example, between the United States and China, where current energy-demand trends in the two countries has put the world on a course where for those trends to be sustained, the earths capacity to render up the black gold will be exhausted within 25 years. Something has got to give. Within these angular and smog-smothered masses of dissipation live most of the people on Earth. The Emotions Matter Dont ignore the people. One of the key issues that the technocrats have with the neo-cons is their demonstrated ignorance of the cultures they aim to conquer. They seem to actually relish this ignorance, as if the culture doesnt matter when we have the cluster bombs. Iraq should have disabused them of this bone-headedness, but if the threatening noises directed at Iran are any indication, it hasnt. The weird apparent plot to unleash an Iranian-dissident armed resistance against Iran, using the Mujahadeen e Khalq (MEK) of all people, whom the US itself has placed 108

on its terrorist organization list, probably qualifies as a higher degree of self-delusion than even the intrepid Ahmad Chalabi was able to midwife the war with the Defense Policy Board. Iranian politics is complex. From the US media that always attempts to reduce every situation to categories appropriate to the attention span of a trout, we hear a tale of clerics versus reformers. But the political scene is far more diverse than that, and the extreme pluralism contained within that diversity does not now incline the Iranians as a whole to abandon political stability, even if lurid Western headlines do occasionally declare that Iran is sitting on a time bomb; sitting on journalistic bombast is closer to the mark. The recent resurgence of clerical forces in Iran was assisted by the belligerence of the US, but it has not been a return to the rule of the older clerical establishment. Younger clerics, who cling to the centrality of Islamic law like their predecessors, recognize that the general dissatisfaction of the Iranian public with the reformists represented by Khatami was with their inability to get things done -- particularly putting an economic modernization agenda on track. Older clerics were positively negligent in economic affairs, where the younger clerical forces are aggressively pursing deals with India, Azerbaijan, and Russia to get an economic development program going again. Among the non-clerical and anti-clerical forces, there is a division between the technocrats who want economic liberalization (privatization) and the nationalistic left that is resisting this agenda. Each of these is oriented to a particular class-and-age base, each is itself factionalized, and no one sector has the popular power on its own to exercise any form of political hegemony. For this reason, no sector is willing to see a destabilization when the outcome would be completely unpredictable. Instead, there is a kind of pendulum effect between clerical and secular forces that inevitably, if slowly, swings further away from the clerics, even if that pendulum is for the moment leaning their way. Strategically, Iran saw the fall of Saddam Hussein as a positive, and even hoped for a rapprochement with the US, as did many American capitalists who desperately want the trade restrictions lifted so they can sell Iran food and join Iran in the oil business. But the Zionists within the administration have prevailed in convincing George W. Bush that Iran is part of an axis of evil, reinforced by the insistence of Ariel Sharon that Iran be the US second regime-change target. Now Iran is looking with consternation at the US attempt to establish a puppet-Iraq as the new regional hegemon (which is a plan falling apart), and at the autonomous aspirations of the Kurds. Alarm at the aggressive rhetoric of the Bush administration and Israel led directly to the clerical reassertion of power and to the resumption of nuclear research. After all, Iranians say, the US and Israel have nuclear weapons, why shouldnt we? Its actually a fair question. Iran is not now politically unstable, and an attack -- even a proxy attack -- against Iran could further consolidate pan-Islamic solidarity based on the justifiable perception that this is an attack against Islam. Remember the 60% of Iraq is Shia, so the political war between the secular Arab Saddam and the clerical Persian Khomeini -- in the face of Saddams removal and the cyclic but steady erosion of the political power of Irans clerical establishment -- is rapidly becoming an historical dead letter. What has grown up in its place is a nascent pan-Islamic resistance -- symbolically perceived as a struggle against a Zionist-Anglo-American enemy, growing out of the very real imperial and expansionist history of these three political actors in the region. This resistance will not facilitate deeper 109

entrenchment of the US military. On the contrary, it will turn it into an even deeper politico-military quagmire. More importantly, it has a huge potential to destabilize the puppet regime in Saudi Arabia, with the largest remaining oil pool on the planet. This, paradoxically, is the goal of Osama bin Laden, and it is now closer to being fulfilled than he might have dreamed five years ago. Already, oil price escalation is threatening Bushs equity-loan recovery with inflation that corresponds to a second recessive dip in early 2005 the dreaded lose-lose combination of stagnation and inflation that was termed stagflation in the 1970s. This anecdotal crisis -- if it happens -- can still be seen against the backdrop of the larger systemic crisis of profit described above. The exterminist process of jettisoning global surplus population, it has to be noted, will not be abrupt or direct. Instead it is a process of accretion, depending on withdrawal, isolation, and neglect, manifesting itself in pandemics, shortened life spans, eco-catastrophes, and the wars of social disintegration. We are seeing the outlines of this process most vividly now in Africa. This process is not happening in one apocalyptic movement, but episodically. This process represents the shrinkage of the material basis of global accumulation, and it is this we have to understand to see into the mind of the technocrats their most immediate fear. If this process is unmediated, even accelerated in one grandiose grab as the neo-cons are now attempting, this accelerates not only the requirement to speed up the transfer of disorder to the peripheries with its attendant political destabilization and resistance it hastens the shifting of this burden onto the population of the United States, upon whom the US ruling class political stability rests. It is notable that in this election year, the primary appeal of the Democratic Party that bureaucratized institutional vehicle for the federalist technocrats is that their patrician presidential candidate is not George W. Bush. The subtext of this appeal is a fear of political polarization in the United States in the face of the inexorable decline in US living standards. These same polarities were catalyzed in the 1960s, when an economically ruinous war polarized an American society that was seeing the end of the post WWII consumer bash. The Democrats are constitutionally incapable of describing the crisis I am describing here. I am guilty of calling them cowards in polemics, but the reality is that this is not cowardice but plain, garden-variety self interest. Their fear of the neo-cons is not that the neo-cons will hurt brown people half a planet away. They have shown themselves to be equally willing to raise body counts. Bill Clinton resided over sanctions that killed far more Iraqis than Bushs little military fiasco. Their fear is that the kinds of questions that are raised in the public mind by the bull-in-a-china-shop methods of the neocons might lead significant sections of that American public to seek out genuine answers, the act on them with social upheavals. So, by God, lets get them an election fast! This justifiable Democrat fear of domestic social polarization was already in evidence when the Democrats lay down before the Republican judicial fiat that decided the 2000 General Election. Rather than provoke a Constitutional crisis that might awaken a whole host of social resentments and shake the body politic out of its virtuous political inertia, they stood down the base within their own party. Who can forget the most astonishing scene in Michael Moores film Fahrenheit 9/11, when Al Gore presided over a Congress wherein every Democrat who challenged the election result mostly African 110

American legislators incensed at the inattention to the Jim Crow tactics employed by the State of Florida was summarily shut down, and none too politely either, by Gore himself. This is the nightmare Brzezinski is trying to avoid: a domestic polarization that might result in an upsurge of grassroots agitation. This is the first danger, not the last, to the dominant class in our present conjuncture. These technocrats are alarmed that the neo-cons are firing their artillery at a distant target, which might wake up the hordes right outside the perimeter. Beyond that domestic perimeter, of course, there is a very real destruction of the all-important myth of American military invincibility. It is not only the armed resistance of Iraq that is making a material contribution to the erosion of US military power. The vast unpopularity in the Philippines of the Iraq war has forced the removal of Filipinos from Iraq, and driven the normally compliant Filipino government to defend its decision against the Australian government. This was not a decision defying the US that was taken lightly by the Arroyo government, dependent as it is upon the US for its very existence. This is a successful assertion of Filipino popular will against the US and against the Arroyo dependency. The same thing was true in Turkey in the run-up to the March 2003 ground offensive, when, in a stunning defeat for the Bush administration, the newly elected Turkish parliament facing a massive Turkish anti-war movement narrowly denied the United States military its northern front for the March ground offensive against Iraq. The habit of thought of the powerful is to focus on others who are powerful, and to ignore the masses. When they do see the masses in action, they tend to judge but not interpret. Last April we first saw the images of people in Fallujah dragging the charred corpses of four mercenaries out of burning vehicles and taking turns pummeling the blackened cadavers with shovels and stones, of dragging the bodies down the street then stringing them up in a grotesque display on a bridge. How many people who saw that wondered where that rage came from? Did they really believe that people in Fallujah are simply savages who would engage in this postmortem mutilation for entertainment? We have since learned, those of us who are paying attention, that Fallujans had been subjected to obscene disrespect and violence by American troops since the beginning of the operation in March 2003, and that many of those who vented their spleens on these roasted corpses had lost family members and friends. The Abu Ghraib photos gave us a glimpse of the kind of humiliation that Iraqis, many of them simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, were subjected to as the colonial dominator-mentality flowered among the occupying troops. This humiliation is now being borne collectively, and the rage we witnessed in the streets of Fallujah is simmering just under the surface of a whole region that has just about had enough. *** Where the fall will begin, no one can say. Will it be the deflationary avalanche that is building under the mountain of debt? Will it be from a polarized America that takes it back to the streets? Will it be in the Zulu Dawn of some military debacle? Or will it be in a nuclear strike approved by the Defense Policy Board? Or will it come as the sum of 111

climate change, the end of oil, the salinization of arable land, the destruction of fisheries, as civilization collapses not with a bang but a whimper? We dont know, and neither do the technocrats. They just have enough sense to be alarmed. They do not however have the power to prevent it, only alter slightly the direction from which it will come. So vote away I have only one thing to say to the Bush administrations fantasy to regime-change Iran. Bring it on. There is nothing so blinding as success. And the United States has had its fair share of success in the past 200 years. Success has the vicious consequence that it seems to breed almost inevitably the conviction that it will necessarily continue. Success is a poor guide to wise policy. Failure at least often leads to reflection; success seldom does. -Immanuel Wallerstein

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Energy & Homeland Security (Originally written for Counterpunch, December 3, 2003) Contrary to its assertions of deep concern about the domestic security of the United States, the Bush administration has substantially degraded homeland security since September 11 while facilitating a massive transfer of public and private wealth into the coffers of the energy industry. The Bush administration, itself composed predominantly of energy industry insiders, has cynically invoked (information) security to conceal this degradation of domestic security, to attack government and corporate whistleblowers, and to protect the enormous energy conglomerates from accountability. Associated Press, November 7, 2003: Washington. The latest warning from the Homeland Security Department that al-Qaida may be plotting an attack is renewing calls for stricter security on cargo planes. The department advised law enforcement officials Friday night of threats that terrorists may fly cargo planes from another country into such crucial U.S. targets as nuclear plants, bridges or dams, Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said. Leon Laylagian of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations security committee said the government must take air cargo security as seriously as it takes air passenger security. ** Mark Hertsgaard, "Nuclear Insecurity," Vanity Fair, November 2003: Over the past two years, the Bush administration has talked tough about defending the United States against terrorism, pointing to the September 11 tragedy to justify much of its domestic and international political agenda, from invading Iraq to limiting civil liberties to relaxing environmental regulations. But... the Bush administration is in fact failing disastrously at the practical job of keeping the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks. In particular, the administration is doing worse than nothing ... leaving serious flaws in the nuclear-security system unrepaired, it is silencing the very public servants who are trying to fix the problem before it is too late. ** Argonne National Laboratory, for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1982: [A] large commercial airliner striking the reactor dome... would easily penetrate the reactor dome... obliterate the reactor core's primary containment thereby immediately releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere without any chance of evacuation. Thousands of 113

people would quickly perish and thousands more would perish over time... the explosive force of jet fuel exploding inside the containment dome would... convert the containment dome itself into a bomb. ** Tale of a Professional (Government) Nuclear Terrorist In a recent article in Vanity Fair, author Mark Hertsgaard writes an account of Rich Levernier, a reluctant nuclear whistleblower who was fired after 22 years with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), two years before he became eligible for his pension. Levernier coordinated mock-terrorist, laser-tag commando attacks to test Department of Energy nuclear weapons facilities for six years prior to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The facilities failed to stop attackers in half the exercises, even when prior notice, issued for safety reasons, eliminated the advantage of surprise. Levernier pushed aggressively to upgrade security at DOE for years, and was ignored until his persistence was rewarded with a job termination and cancellation of his security clearance. The Levernier story is emblematic of a Bush administration antagonism toward all whistleblowers, public and private. That antagonism has vastly increased domestic vulnerability to attack. The administration is deploying homeland security concerns as justification to shield Bush-friendly corporations from public security upgrade costs, to conceal backroom deals, and to marginalize--and sometimes even criminalize--insiders who speak their conscience. Since this administration took office, it has declared virtual war on whistleblowers. Silencing the Witnesses In May 2003, Special Counsel Elaine Kaplan and deputy Tim Hannapel simultaneously resigned from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that investigates wrongdoing often reported by government whistleblowers. Kaplan had overseen the transformation of the OSC from yet another toothless watchdog into an agency that was as relentless in pursuit of investigations as it was protective of its sources: especially whistleblowers. The Project on Government Oversight called her tenure a "virtual revolution." Her efforts ran headlong into a heavily Republican Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that has shown an implacable hostility to government and business whistleblowers. The Federal Circuit interpreted the whistleblower protection in a way that raised the bar for protection only to include whistleblowers whose information is "undeniable and incontestable," a standard that is more appropriately applied to court proceedings. The court granted the government agencies themselves the presumption of good faith, and wholly shifted an extreme burden of proof onto whistleblowers. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) bristled that the Federal Circuit had corrupted the intent of Congress which had crafted the 1990 Whistleblower Protection Act to shield civil

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servants from retaliation who spoke out about suspected waste, abuse, neglect, and malfeasance. When federal judicial hostility to whistleblowers was combined with the aggressive anti-whistleblower interventions of the Bush executive branch, of which the OSC is a part, Kaplan left the agency. It is perhaps not surprising that prior to her appointment to the OSC, Kaplan was deputy General Counsel to the National Treasury Employees Union until going to the OSC in 1998. Among the first targets of the Bush administration, after it declared the war on terror, were government employee unions, particularly the whistleblower protection clauses of their contracts. The Bush administration began accelerated planning for agency consolidation within the Department of Homeland Security immediately in the wake of 9/11, a department where one might assume that abuse, corruption, or neglect would be a primary concern encouraging open-door policies for whistleblowers. The door that opened, however, was the exit. Now it might even be the entry to a jail cell. Whistleblower protections were excised from proposals for the Department of Homeland Security and the newly formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). To his great credit, Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa -- breaking ranks with many in his party -- issued a call in 2002 to restore whistleblower protection to all jobs and contracts. Government agencies too often want to cover up their mistakes, said Grassley, and the temptation is even greater when bureaucracies can use a potential security issue as an excuse. At the same time, the information whistleblowers provide is all the more important when public safety and security is at stake. This was precisely Rich Levernier's intent when he became a nuclear gadfly: to overcome bureaucratic inertia that left weapons grade nuclear material vulnerable to theft. President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney both have strong personal financial ties to energy companies. This year Executive Order-13303 was issued. It repeals whistleblower protection for employees who report human rights violations, mismanage accounting, or falsify shareholder reports for companies with contracts for Iraqi oil commerce. Chief among these corporations is Halliburton, for which Dick Cheney was the Chief Executive Officer before taking office, and from which he still receives a six-figure annual check. Another egregious example of this pattern was the Ashcroft Justice Department's attempt to railroad Congress to accept Patriot Act II, humorously called the Domestic Security and Enhancement Act, in which the Bush administration managed to slip clauses that undermine previous regulatory law, like the Clean Air Act, by classifying data available to the public on hazardous emissions. Nat Hentoff, in Bush-Ashcroft vs. Homeland Security (Village Voice, April 18, 2003) details this bit of trickery. He quotes Tim Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union, who points out that the Clean Air Act requires that "corporations that use potentially dangerous chemicals must prepare an analysis of consequences of the release of such chemicals to the surrounding communities." In section 202 of Ashcroft's ploy, this public oversight would have been summarily killed and even stating the location of one of the facilities no longer under public scrutiny would have become a felony. Edgar told Hentoff that government whistle-blowers who reveal any information restricted under this section commit a criminal offense, even if their motivation 115

was to protect the public from corporate wrongdoing or government neglect. This clause of the Domestic Security and Enhancement Act, had the act passed (which it thankfully did not), would have done nothing to increase public security, its clear intent being to wrap a cloak of secrecy around corporate patrons to enable maximization of profits while neglecting public safety and health. The primary beneficiaries of weakened clean air regulation are energy companies. Lies, Damn Lies, and 103 Dirty Bombs A May 2003 report from North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network reveals that there are nuclear facilities with far less protection than nuclear weapons plants. Nuclear power plants contain immense quantities of highly radioactive material, are already located near large urban centers, and any one of them could be activated as a Predeployed Radiological Weapon (a term coined by Dr. Gordon Thompson, a nuclear security expert). On September 11, 2001, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees security at all 103 nuclear power plants in the United States, issued a public statement that nuclear power plants were designed to sustain an aircraft attack like those that had just destroyed the World Trade towers. This was a lie. Ten days later, when confronted from several quarters with information to the contrary, the NRC admitted that the statement was not true. As it turns out, the Argonne National Laboratory/NRC studied the question of the impact of a large commercial airliner in 1982. Their own results (published as NUREG/CR-[REDACTED] pp. 61-65) contradict the September 11 claim. [A] large commercial airliner striking the reactor dome... would easily penetrate the reactor dome... obliterate the reactor core's primary containment thereby immediately releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere without any chance of evacuation. Thousands of people would quickly perish and thousands more would perish over time... the explosive force of jet fuel exploding inside the containment dome would... convert the containment dome itself into a bomb. Impartial security experts as well as 27 state attorneys general, now agree that the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants present an equally devastating and far more easily accessible target than the reactors. The results from a reactor core melt would be more acute, while the result of burning waste fuel would take longer to materialize, but both scenarios are unthinkable. The nation's 103 nuclear power plants have packed the waste fuel from each reactor into water-filled cooling pools like sardines. In addition to the threat of intentional activations of these cesium-bombs for malicious motives, accidental loss of cooling will also cause a pool fire, which Brookhaven National Laboratory estimates could cause--depending on the location and conditions -- up to 140,000 cancer deaths, $500 billion in off-site property damage, and contamination of thousands of square miles. This nightmare scenario can be rendered moot by simply re-racking these waste fuel assemblies back to the original design distance, where air convection can prevent selfignition. Unfortunately, few elected officials want to confront the nation's powerful utilities about their irresponsible behavior, and the putative Nuclear Regulatory Commission has its leadership appointed by people who win elections with generous contributions from the very utilities that continue to gamble with public safety to protect profit margins. 116

The NRC's September 11 lie, that nuclear plants could withstand aerial suicide attack, was recanted and replaced with yet another lie. On September 21, while admitting that an aircraft could destroy a nuclear plant after all, the NRC spokesperson said that the nuclear industry was unprepared for this contingency because nobody conceived of this kind of assault. In fact, the federal government, including the NRC, had been considering the possibility of just such an attack since 1994, after the Algerian Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France plane with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower a plot that was foiled because none of the hijackers knew how to pilot a plane. Later asymmetric warriors corrected that deficiency, as we were to find out in 2001. In Spring of 2003, when a study developed at Princeton showed the vulnerability of spent fuel pools to attack and its consequences, Commissioner Ed McGaffigan of the NRC issued a memorandum to his staff directing them to discredit the study; not to review the study to determine its merits and weaknesses, but to discredit it deeply. That study, in fact, had been strongly validated in Princeton's peer review process. At around the same time, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a nuclear industry public relations consortium, issued a report purporting to show that nuclear plants would withstand a suicide pilot attack. Neither McGaffigan nor the NRC criticized this report that was quickly exposed by the scientific community and the media as little more than a fraud. Nor did McGaffigan or the NRC even once take the nuclear utilities to account for repeating the false conclusions of the EPRI study in public in order to rebut community concerns about nuclear risks. In a recent exchange of correspondence with Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety engineer David Lochbaum, McGaffigan admitted that the NRC deliberately stood back while the EPRI falsifications were propagated by the industry. Lochbaum, responding to the Department of Homeland security alert that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack cargo planes to hit nuclear plants, confronted McGaffigan with the contradictory reaction of the NRC. Why did this commission try to discredit a scientifically valid report and simultaneously stand by while the industry repeated the dangerous EPRI deception to the public? McGaffigan claimed to Lochbaum that the NRC had publicly criticized the EPRI study, but this writer has searched in vain for a single instance of this alleged criticism. McGaffigan claimed that this lost criticism was issued to acknowledge weaknesses in nuclear plants, and that the NRC attacked the Princeton study because it was overstated. Yet in the same breath, McGaffigan told Lochbaum that the NRC opted not to rebut the EPRI study because it might call al Qaeda's attention to soft spots. Either the NRC publicly criticized the EPRI study or it did not. Commissioner McGaffigan told at least one lie during his exchange with Lochbaum. And yet again, security was cited as a reason for reducing public accountability and sustaining inaction. Black Hats & Cruise Missiles While European nuclear plants began in the eighties to harden their own plants-especially spent fuel storage--against aircraft crashes, accidental or intentional, the NRC made a conscious choice not to impose this financial hardship on the U.S. nuclear industry. 117

The basis upon which the NRC evaluates the security posture of a nuclear power plant is something called the Design Basis Threat (DBT), a scenario upon which all security mandates are predicated. The NRC failed to upgrade the DBT to include an aircraft attack after the 1994 Algerian hijacking, even though as early as 1982 the agency acknowledged a crash could convert a nuclear plant into a hellish catastrophe. The DBT for attack that it continued to use was a scenario where only three armed intruders on foot attempted to gain access to the plant. This brings us back to the story of Rich Levernier, a career expert in testing the defenses of nuclear weapons facilities. Nuclear weapons sites are given a far higher level of protection than commercial power plants. Nuclear power plants are not authorized to use (as nuclear weapons facilities do) automatic weapons, and power plants cannot employ (as weapons facilities can) relaxed standards regulating the use of deadly force. Nuclear weapons facilities have SWAT-like teams and far more robust external barrier and sensor systems. Nuclear power plant security personnel are barely trained above the level of mall security guards. When surveyed, some of these personnel have openly stated that if they are out-gunned, and if faced with a determined attack they would likely run like hell. Given that September 11 involved a minimum of 19 attackers, and given that Levernier's black hat mock terrorist teams, who are all ex-military, used teams of ten or more people who succeeded in stealing weapons grade material from the more heavily guarded nuclear weapons facilities in half of the canned exercises, it is safe to assume that the DBT of three terrestrial attackers for commercial power plants was inadequate. NRC Chairman Richard Meserve claimed after 9/11 that the risk of attack at power plants was too speculative to warrant upgrading the DBT. Bush administration NRC Chair Nils Diaz, who replaced Meserve in 2003, was forced by public pressure to act. But the NRC did so grudgingly, and the minimal changes in the DBT (reportedly from three attackers to five) are now classified and unavailable to the very public whose safety is at stake. This seems to infer that the federal government, far from enhancing the physical security of people in the United States, is using post-9/11 security-state measures to preserve and protect private sector negligence. The alarming fact is that in the real world--with the element of surprise that actual attackers would have -- a trained and committed force of fewer than ten people, with nothing more than what they could carry on their backs, could breach the security of a U.S. nuclear power plant almost one hundred percent of the time and demolish either the spent fuel pools or the reactor -- or both. Of course, the NRC has altogether refused to include any one of various air attacks in the revised DBT. On November 7, 2003, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had information that led it to believe elements of the al Qaeda network were planning to hijack cargo aircraft outside the United States and fly them into nuclear power plants. Apparently al Qaeda figured out that there is no need to transport a radiological weapon into the United States, when 103 of them are already deployed around the country, invariably near urban centers.1 What the Department of Homeland Security apparently has not figured out is that it is likewise not necessary for attackers to hijack airplanes outside the country to activate
1

For the record, I do not believe there is such an organization as al Qaeda, as I have explained elsewhere, but readers may miss the fact that my tongue is sometimes resting against my cheek. -SG

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the huge dirty bombs. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report in September 2003 that showed 70 general aviation aircraft had been stolen inside the United States within the last five years. That is an average of 14 aircraft a year. These are small planes at short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) airfields. Cursory research shows that the most common light aircraft in the United States is the Cessna Skyhawk. A Tomahawk Cruise Missile is a precision weapon that can hug the earth, evade radar, travel to a range of 600 miles, and deliver up to 1,000 pounds of high explosive onto a target. A Cessna Skyhawk has a range of 687 miles, can carry a payload up to 675 pounds, and likewise can hug the contours of the earth to evade radar and deliver its payload with pinpoint accuracy. These general aviation aircraft then, with the simple addition of a committed pilot prepared to die and 500 pounds of high explosive with a simple impact-detonation device, could be employed as a poor person's Cruise missile. In a different report, the GAO recently released a sharp criticism of the NRCs nuclear power plant security program, stating not only that the system was inadequate to ensure genuine security, but that aspects of its security inspection program reduced NRCs effectiveness in overseeing protection of the nation's plants. The GAO pointed out that: . the NRC's force-on-force exercises are completely unrealistic, . the NRC had no centralized system to upgrade industry security, . NRC inspectors (whose numbers have been dramatically reduced by the Bush administration) now classify many security lapses as non-cited violations. The latter problem is particularly troubling, because it gives credence to the suspicion (alluded to above) that understating the threat at nuclear plants is the intent of the NRC. This would be consistent with a longstanding NRC tendency to prioritize the financial health of nuclear utilities above all other concerns, including public safety. Cooking the Books The non-cited violation is among several changes that the NRC has implemented in the reporting of security and safety compliance failures by nuclear utilities. These formerly documented lapses are simply no longer written down. These changes have consistently resulted in fewer industry violations being reported without any actual improvement in security performance by the utilities. It is logical to assume then that minimizing the numbers of violations reported is the actual intended goal of NRC procedure. In response to criticisms that the NRC is loosening oversight just at the moment when tighter control is called for, Richard Meserve, the chairman of the NRC after 9/11, claimed loosened regulations were merely better analytical tools that let the NRC assess the risks and make judgments in a more precise way than we were before. And where we believe things were overly conservative and unnecessary or imposing an undue burden, we back off. (italics added)

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It is very difficult to understand how (1) muzzling whistleblowers, (2) concealing security criteria from public scrutiny and accountability, and (3) backing off on reporting security violations are consistent with this administration's rhetoric about homeland security. Then again, so is the notion that perpetual war soemhow improves security. Since September 11, state and local emergency services budgets have been stripped bare, National Guard troops have been sent to Iraq, reservists who worked in local police, EMS, and fire departments have been subtracted from net manpower, the entire northeast was blacked out, California burned, children across Southwest Asia and North Africa wear Osama bin Laden t-shirts, and Iraqis are more and more often naming their newborns Saddam. Perhaps the most substantial threat to U.S. domestic security, aside from breeding millions of new enemies with international arrogance and lethal military provocations, is bureaucratic obfuscation. Homeland Insecurity When whistleblowers in the U.S. government point to serious flaws in our current security posture, they are not rewarded with bonuses and promotions and their insight acted upon to correct the flaws. The Bush administration has been more ruthless than any executive branch since the McCarthy era at punishing them and railroading them out of government service. The Joseph Wilson case demonstrated the lengths to which this administration will go to punish any government employee who dares to tell the truth if it has embarrassment potential. Wilson exposed the Niger uranium deception that was used to further justify the invasion of Iraq. A White House official (probably Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby) retaliated against Wilson by telling the press that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. This exposure forced her to be brought in from the field and permanently demolished any chance she can ever again operate in her former capacity, ironically enough, specializing in weapons of mass destruction. Rather than increase the security of people inside the United States, this administration has used 9/11 as a pretext for imposing secrecy under the guise of national security to protect capitalist accumulation, particularly nuclear power utilities, from regulatory mandates that would heighten safety and security measures. This has led to a situation in which public health and safety, and most paradoxically security against attack, has actually been degraded under the pretext of homeland security. White House counter-terrorism advisor Rand Beers resigned in disgust with the administration in March saying, They're making us less secure, not more secure. As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. A recent Project on Government Oversight (POGO) study of mock attack evaluations at nuclear plants showed that in the months leading up to a mock attack test, the utilities hire security-training consultants and additional guards to improve their security posture and chances of success. Even a nuclear industry representative acknowledged that utilities spend 'millions of dollars' getting ready for the tests. Even with this massive and artificial preparation, in which some guards were worked in repeated 14hour shifts, the plants failed the exercises 46% of the time. 120

POGO executive director Danielle Brian commented, This dumbed-down test cannot offer any assurances of adequate security. In a rational system, the regulators (NRC) would be grateful to those who pointed out this serious security flaw, and even reward them for creating the opportunity to correct it before a tragedy occurred. The NRC, however, claiming POGO was violating security, directed them to retract publication of a letter to NRC Chairman Nils Diaz that outlined POGO's security concerns. On the Bush administration's coziness with the nuclear power industry, Nevada Senator Richard Bryan said, Bush is so close to the nuclear industry that when you turn off the lights he glows in the dark. Bush administration perks for energy companies are hardly surprising when the Bush cabinet and the contributors to the Bush 2000 election campaign are taken into account. Stacking the Energy Deck The Natural Resources Defense Council called the Bush cabinet an Energy Industry Dream Team. Newsweek opined in May 2001, Not since the rise of the railroads more than a century ago has a single industry [energy] placed so many foot soldiers at the top of a new administration. The real nuclear power story however is the Bush Energy Transition Advisory Team (ETAT). It has 48 members, and 14 of them are from nuclear utilities, led by Joe Colvin, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Nevada Representative Shelley Berkley said that the ETAT reads like the who's who of the nuclear power industry. Thirty-four of the 48 members of the ETAT gave personal campaign contributions to the Bush presidential campaign. One top member who was the biggest single contributor to the Bush campaign was then-CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay. Lay was quietly eased aside after the huge energy trading company was exposed as one of the biggest criminal enterprises in history, and one that wiped out the life savings of tens of thousands of people. It is little wonder that nuclear utilities (all of which are also coal utilities), along with the petroleum sector, have done so well under the Bush administration. They run it. It appears to me, quipped Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, we have the [energy] industry directing policy. The Bush administration's public relations people have spun out a series of Orwellian narratives implying that the energy needs of American society are synonymous with the financial imperatives of the huge holding companies that now own most public utilities, that nuclear energy is cheaper, safer, and cleaner than all fossil energy (it is none of these), and that emotional rhetoric about homeland security somehow suggests that this is an administration that is showing a genuine material commitment to public safety. On Saturday night, November 15, 2003, the Bush administration secretly slipped new provisions into their execrable so-called Energy Bill that included a 1.8 cent per kilowatt-hour nuclear production tax credit that could cost taxpayers over $7.5 billion, according to the Nuclear Information Resource Service. Previously existing subsidies and public support of nuclear energy amounts to almost $4 billion a year now, with a

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cumulative total of $140 billion since the industry began, making nuclear generated electricity the most expensive in existence. NIRS spokesperson Cindy Folkers sardonically remarked, Apparently the Bush Administration only upholds free market principles when it isn't inconvenient for their campaign contributors. But the most remarkable aspect of the new provisions is that they gut terrorism protection provisions written in the original House-passed bill, and repeal a ban on exporting highly enriched uranium to other countries, increasing the chances that nuclear reactors could be hit by terrorists, or that nuclear bomb material could fall into terrorist hands, said Folker. Conclusion The first step toward understanding what this administration is doing is to connect the energy-security nexus dots. The stakes are incredibly high on many accounts. This monograph has attempted to show the connection between putative national security measures and what appears to be a massive assault on environmental, health, safety, and security oversight any time genuine oversight threatens the expansion of already-substantial energy sector profits. This is an administration that has shown an alarming willingness to use national security as a pretext for going after its political enemies and undermining constitutional protections, including the scapegoat roundups of thousands of immigrants without due cause. The same people who call these racist roundups an issue of homeland security willingly deploy the pretext of national security to erase corporate accountability and even to criminalize truth-tellers on behalf of private companies. Given the administration's penchant for demonizing opponents of its domestic andor foreign policies, and the symbiotic relationship between this administration and the private energy sector, they could well change their name from the Bush administration to Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft, Inc. Their corporate logo could be a giant Panopticon eye in the background with an oil well, a smokestack, and a cooling tower in the foreground, and the emblazoned red, white, and blue motto: Patriotism For Profit! Public Safety for Sale! A starting point in any campaign to reverse the dangerous direction of domestic and foreign policy with regard to energy is to continue to confront the most dangerous and expensive form of that energy: nuclear power. The immediate concern must be plain security, and this is a tremendous political vulnerability of the Bush administration policies, precisely because there is such a glaring mismatch between word and deed coming out of Washington. So the fight to harden nuclear power facilities, heighten security, thin the spent fuel pools, and bunker in the dry storage modules remains a high priority, even for those who want to decommission all nuclear power facilities. Whether plants are running or not, the waste material must be secured for many generations. So much for those who argue that we should abolish the state! The issue of nuclear risk reduction is embedded in the framework of a much larger question about the whole Bush energy agenda. That agenda, when subjected to close scrutiny, is one of the most egregious instances of social and environmental vandalism in memory. Environmentalists, nuclear watchdogs, labor unions, consumer advocates, civil libertarians, campaign finance reformers, corporate welfare opponents, anti-sprawl 122

activists, public health advocates, fuel efficiency advocates, transportation reformers, those who want genuine domestic security, and many other organizations and advocates share a common interest in fighting back against this so-called energy plan when it is inevitably resurrected. The Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft Homeland Energy Plan was a disaster in the making. It needs a stake driven through its heart. Andrew McKillop, a founding member of the International Association of Energy Economists, said in 1998, "Energy ... is certainly linked to, or behind almost any international event, crisis, war, military adventure or environmental catastrophe that we are forced to witness almost any day." One wonders whether he was staring into a crystal ball. Four years later, the Bush administration's energy wars have destabilized the globe and husbanded a proliferation of hostile, committed, and dangerously sophisticated nonstate actors. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's symbiotic relationship with energy profiteers at home is lowering our ability, behind a veil of official secrecy, to protect the public from this increasing hostility. Early in the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men boarded airplanes as people who worked at the World Trade Center reported in for an average day, never considering that history was about to lethally converge on them. We might have learned something about international provocation, bureaucratic complacency, and political arrogance. This administration apparently has not.

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Exterminism and the World in the Wake of Katrina (Originally published in From The Wilderness, September 2005) Helicobacter pylori. Hardly part of our daily discourse, is it? But all of us have given and received the popular wisdom, Stop worrying. Youre going to give yourself ulcers. Even though Australian pathologists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren have just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery (20 years ago!) that ulcers are not caused by stress at all, but by a bacterium with the Latinate name at the beginning of this commentary. Not only does the popular belief persist that ulcers are brought about by stress, the medical community itself resisted this discovery for years. Entire medical protocols, as well as entire lines of symptom-amelioration pharmaceuticals and commercialized stressmanagement schemes, had been developed and deployed based on this false belief. The stress ulcer proved to be no more valid than the Medieval European certainty about humors or the persistent New Age confidence in astrology. The Helicobacter discovery process is interesting because it was an accident. Marshall was tired before Easter weekend in 1982. He forgot to wash out a Petri dish at the lab. When he came back, a colony of Helicobacter pylori had grown out. Marshall and Warren gazed at the critter long enough to imprint its microscopic morphology into their own neural pathways, and then noticed that the same curly creature was present every time they studied inflamed gastric tissue. Two morals to this story are (1) that our most treasured and erroneous beliefs are often based on unexamined and widely-accepted premises and (2) that the law of unintended consequences can be our friend if we retain a healthy skepticism about our premises and prepare to follow-up on new information. For me, the most significant lesson here is that we need new language if we are to think about things in new ways. The categories, symbols, and meanings extolled in our usual chatter dont just structure what we do know. They structure what we can know. Stress management cannot treat ulcers effectively. That didnt stop anyone from treating ulcers ineffectively for decades. The reverberations from Hurricane Katrina (and Rita in its wake) are too numerous to know or name. Identifying some of the illusions about this so-called aftermath, however, and applying unfamiliar ways of understanding it, will put us on ground high enough to see over the puerile nonsense we hear from the oral formulaic news models of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. Ulcers are better understood when we learn to say Helicobacter pylori. The Aftermath is better understood when we learn to say exterminism. Exterminism I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is not a constant. Raleigh is a transient political boundary. So is North Carolina. Three years ago, I lived inside another political boundary Wake County, but outside Raleigh. I did not move inside the boundary of Raleigh; it moved over me. We were annexed.

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Seven years ago, when I first moved to where I live now, I lived in a neighborhood surrounded by a deciduous forest. My oldest son and I used to walk in the woods past our cul-de-sac, and there was a stream there. One day, we sat quietly long enough for a beaver and two of her kittens to come paddling up that stream, whereupon they disappeared into a den that we hadnt noticed before. Throughout the woods, there were orange plastic ribbons tied onto the trees. They marked future streets for future subdivisions and for commercial lots. Raleigh needs to increase tax revenue to promote growth, and it has to grow to increase tax revenue. The annexation happened on schedule. The trees were toppled, the soil graded into flat terraces by giant diesel-powered machines, and last year I was driving down a new road near the stream, where I saw a dead beaver run over by a car. Now we have an industrial park, a monster strip mall, a Super WalMart , and hundreds of new Masonite houses with vegetation purchased from the Lowes and Home Depots Garden Departments. There are orange plastic ribbons tied to the trees that remain in the shrinking ribbons of forest that were bypassed by the bulldozers to mark the paths of the bulldozers to come. When I first moved here, I saw another curious thing. A worm die-off. For several weeks one late Spring, as I strolled on the asphalt walking trail in my neighborhood and along the concrete sidewalks, thousands and thousands of earthworms emerged after each rain and crawled out onto the sidewalks in writhing masses, where they would be picked off by gluttonous robins or left to shrivel and harden into curly fries under the next sun. Rain frequently drives worms aboveground for the robins, but the scale of this was different. I suspect a landscaping chemical, but I cant know for sure. Just weeks ago, my younger son, Jeremy, observed a hit and run near that knocked a young doe off the road. He called me on his cell phone, distressed because the deer was alive with two obviously broken legs, lying in a ditch completely conscious and terrified. I drove out to where he was and put his and the deers minds at ease the only way I knew how I shot her in the head with a .22 target pistol. She died instantly. The shot must have nicked the spinal cord because her neck momentarily convulsed around as if she were trying to reach up into a thicket for a morsel before she convulsed and lay still. Compared to those who drowned in their own homes during Hurricane Katrina, this little doe actually had a merciful death. The shock of the car hitting her, fifteen minutes of pain and fear, then the relief of death. We dont have the willingness to think about what it is like to die slowly, trapped in a sweltering attic with putrid floodwaters climbing at us. We dont have the capacity to know how to think about this misery and terror times millions. But such is the world. Katrina exposed us to images of misery and fear unique to us, just as 9-11 was that are experienced by millions, by hundreds of millions of people every day. Much of the world routinely lives in conditions as dire as Katrinas deadly wake. Internalities & Externalities Progress, or growth chews threw the world like a feral pig just as it chewed through the forest around my house. No one intentionally killed the deer or the beaver. Their deaths were simply a by-product a statistical probability the collateral damage of a social system reproducing itself. Exterminism is this process writ large writ worldwide. Exterminism is the final stage of imperialism.

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We cannot know the true meanings of Katrina in the familiar language of the Imperium; and we cannot link Katrina to either ecocide or the seemingly maniacal devotion of the neocons to the Iraqi bloodbath by simply comparing the costs of Katrina and the costs of the war. This goes well beyond shopkeeper logic. Ecocide a terrifying danger often ignored on the left and right permanent war, and the malignant neglect of Katrinas victims, are intimately and structurally related. Exterminism was first proposed as close as I can determine from cursory research by Edward Thompson in 1980, in which he wrote an essay for New Left Review called Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization. Exterminism, according to Thompson, describes those characteristics of a society expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity and its ideology which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes. Must be as in inevitable within the system. It is, in other words, the tacit or open acceptance of the necessity for mass exterminations or die-offs (often beginning with mass displacements) as the price for continued accumulation and the political dominance of a ruling class. Shock and Awe doctrine is an expression of exterminism. Refusal to intervene in the AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa is equally an expression of exterminism. Exterminism is not totally, or even most often, characterized by offensive action against whole populations, but frequently accomplished by calculated neglect the instruments of which are poverty, disease, malnutrition , and natural disasters and frequently facilitated by economic isolation and the mass displacement of populations. Imperialism is not merely the oppression and control of nation by nation. It is a system of inter-dependency in a very specific form of capitalism. There is no ideal and universal form of capitalism but only transient forms, bounded by changing externalities and driven by changing internalities. Todays form is both imperial and exterminist. It requires the plunder of nation by nation, and it necessitates mass displacement, mass neglect, and eventual death as part of its inexorable logic. This is what we saw on a relatively small scale, even if we did not know it, with the spectacle of people starving and dehydrated on flood-besieged rooftops while a smiling George W. Bush cut a birthday cake for a smiling John McCain. This is what we dont see because it is not displayed in our cultural production in the wasting away of tens of millions with HIV-AIDS in Africa. In fact, many in the US whether they will say it aloud or not find this African dieoff perfectly acceptable. The externalities include resource limitations and the laws of thermodynamics, and are dramatically determined by how we consume of fossil hydrocarbons. The internalities include the tendencies within the capital accumulation regime the tendency of population to grow as part of the expansion of capital; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; and the twin-tendencies of expanding technological mass and urbanization. The results of interaction between externalities and internalities can be seen from Tal Afar, Iraq to New Orleans, Louisiana. War and neglect are two faces of exterminism. The Big Not-So-Easy The Port of New Orleans is central to the worlds busiest port complex the Lower 126

Mississippi River. It is at the terminus of 14,500-mile inland waterway system for the export transshipment of steel, grain, containers, and manufactured goods. It is the only deepwater port in the US connecting to six class one railheads. It is also the import point for most of the nations imported steel, natural rubber, plywood, tropical produce, and coffee. In the last 10 years, contrary to the pure free-market ideology, the government has invested almost half a billion dollars in this facility to externalize the costs of the corporations who reap the profits passing through this port. This externalizing is not the same as an externality. It means that public funds are provided to capitalist enterprises via critical infrastructure, research, and development, to ensure their expansion and profitability. Externalities, on the other hand, refers to the material world and its processes outside the direct gaze of economic activity. The quantity and disposition of the earths remaining oil is an externality. The social process that determines how it is extracted, refined, and sold constitutes an internality. The interactions between externality and internality can be measured in numerous ways from steel shortages, to fishing harvests, to oil production, to climate-change weather patterns the list of indices is very long. In January 2004, business journals were abuzz with the news that steel prices had risen 66% in six months because of a global shortage. Externally, it doesnt take a rocket scientist, as they say, to understand that iron is a finite resource. Internally, demand for steel was on a rocket-like rise based on the rapid industrialization of China, and less so but significantly India, and the continued demand from industrial metropoles like the United States. It must also be noted, and not incidentally, that the mining and smelting and forging of steel depend on tremendous inputs of fossil hydrocarbons steel for cars, steel for ships, steel for corporate office buildings, steel for weapons. In the aggregate, it is not overstating the case to say that the world is in the early stages of a steel famine. As the resources are depleted, the strongest will lay claim to the remainder and let the rest shrivel and die if necessary. Exterminism has a seagull ethic but these gulls have only a pond and not an ocean. Hydrocarbon-powered super trawlers, the direct outcome of capitalist competition in the fishing industry, have laid waste to the worlds fisheries, exploiting two-thirds of them beyond their capacity, toppling coral reefs with their drag nets, and wrecked entire ecosystems by killing by-catch non-saleable sea life that is simply thrown overboard. By-catch is environmental exterminsm. There is also human by-catch. It might be called Africanization. Kill everything. Take what you want. Throw the rest overboard. In the reconstruction of New Orleans, who will be the by-catch? Coastal development, agricultural runoff (mostly petrochemicals), and the percolation of heavy metals, PCBs, and other toxins, have killed plant life and contaminated fish. Galveston Bay, that Hurricane Rita barely missed, has already lost over 90% of its sea grass from pollution. The coastal wetlands that are critical to ocean habitats are being destroyed at a rate of 20,000 acres a year. The levees in and around New Orleans were built originally to keep the port clear of silt. This worked, but the problem then became the build-up of silt on the high-water side of the levees, which required periodic additions to the tops of the levees, weakening the overall structures. John McFee, writing for the New Yorker (Atchafalaya) on September 12, 2005, 127

noted: You put five feet on and three feet sink, a Corps engineer remarked to me one day. This is especially true of the levees that frame the Atchafalaya swamp, so the Corps has given up trying to fight the subsidence there with earth movers alone, and has built concrete floodwalls along the tops of the levees, causing the largest river swamp in North America to appear to be the worlds largest prison. It keeps in not only water, of course, but silt. Gradually, the swamp elevations are building up. The people of Acadiana say that the swamp would be the safest place in which to seek refuge in a major flood, because the swamp is higher than the land outside the levees. As sediments slide down the continental slope and the river is prevented from building a proper lobe as the delta plain subsides and is not replenished erosion eats into the coastal marshes, and quantities of Louisiana steadily disappear. The net loss is over fifty square miles a year. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a fort was built about a thousand feet from a saltwater bay east of New Orleans. The fort is now collapsing into the bay. In a hundred years, Louisiana as a whole has decreased by a million acres. Plaquemines Parish is coming to pieces like old rotted cloth. A hundred years hence, there will in all likelihood be no Plaquemines Parish, no Terrebonne Parish. Such losses are being accelerated by access canals to the sites of oil and gas wells. After the canals are dredged, their width increases on its own, and they erode the region from the inside. A typical three-hundred-foot oil-and-gas canal will be six hundred feet wide in five years. There are in Louisiana ten thousand miles of canals. In the nineteenfifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country straight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The canal is known as Mr. Go, and shipping has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years, is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inches of additional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an interstate that jumps over the walls. The coast is sinking out of sight, Oliver Houck has said. Weve reversed Mother Nature. Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north. Exterminism does not recognize the precautionary principle. Sow the Wind and Reap the Whirlwind

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By all economically disinterested accounts, two major events are now coinciding that combine externality and internality: Peak oil and global warming. The accelerated burning of fossil hydrocarbons to fuel capitalist expansion has expanded humanity itself to almost 7 billions souls and parked us at a tunnel on the top of a mountain the Hubbert peak of oil extraction and in the process re-injected enough of the carbon that was captured inside the earth to abruptly (in geological time) raise the average temperature of the earths atmosphere. On the other side of this tunnel, the only direction is down, and the road is very, very rough. In the wake of Katrina and the damage it inflicted on US oil platforms and refineries, Saudi Arabia the worlds largest oil patch reluctantly announced that it could not increase production sufficiently to offset the losses. This is the third time in the last two years that Saudi Arabia has made excuses for not raising production. Matthew Simmons, energy investor and author of Twilight in the Desert The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy who actually served on Cheneys energy panel (but who is now the equivalent of Benedict Arnold or Joseph Wilson) has been warning that Saudi production projections (which Hubbert advocates said would push Saudis peak production past 2012) are inflated, and that Saudi Arabia itself may have already peaked meaning that the world has passed its Hubbert peak and will go into permanent decline in the face increasing demand from the US, India, and China, and in the face of Western Europes near total dependency on oil imports. This is externality and internality pressing in contrary directions like the two faces of the San Andreas Fault. For a dematerialized economy, the United States certainly needs a lot of that material oil. We have allowed market forces (the valorization of capital under competitive pressure) to design our entire society in ways that trap thousands inside New Orleans during a storm, and that will trap millions in the unsustainable suburbs of the not-toodistant future. Our whole society is now developed around the private automobile the colossal stupidity of which will astonish future historians for centuries. Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature, calls the United States Automobilia. In the same book, he publishes an interesting list of figures. In 1972, when Earth Day was first declared, the earth was home to around 250 million automobiles. That number now is around 800 million. In the same period, oil extraction has gone from 46 million barrels a day to around 80 million; natural gas extraction from 34 trillion cubic feet per year to 95 trillion; coal extraction from 2.2 billion metric tons annually to 3.8 billion; air traffic has multiplied by six, tree harvesting (the cutting down of carbon buffers and oxygen producers) has more than doubled (destroying approximately half the remaining forests of the word); fish harvests doubled; 40% of agricultural soil was degraded; half the wetlands were destroyed; half of the coastal areas in the US were declared unfit for swimming or fishing; the hole in the atmospheric ozone over Antarctica opened to half the size of the continental Untied States; almost 8 billion tons of pollutants are now released annually in the US (disproportionately onto the communities of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans); and not surprisingly annual carbon emissions into the atmosphere have increased from 3.9 million metric tons to 6.4 million. In that same period, the average temperature of the earths atmosphere rose one degree Fahrenheit. That doesnt sound like much, since we see fluctuations of one degree in our personal lives every few minutes. But what this degree has done is begin melting the permafrost, melting the iconic snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro, raising the temperature of 129

the oceans the effects have been well documented. Here we will talk about only one effect. The increased water temperature and slight elevation in sea level that fed energy into and ramped up the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. From the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University: The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although we cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricane will occur in the future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures. In this steady accumulation of contradictory forces, external and internal, the Almighty Market with its field of vision no longer than the next business cycle (or even the next online trade) fuels the inertia of this runaway train and produces the dog-eat-dog evacuation plan that strands the flooded poor atop their roofs or dying in their attics. We dont normally put these emergencies together with the documentation of 112 marine species since the 1700s and 16 marine extinctions since 1972. To do that we have to look at what is in that water, at what has happened to it, and at how the Market determines that those people on the roofs are mere by-catch. This is the essence of exterminism which accepts massive displacements and die-offs of human beings and of whole sections of the biosphere. It is the recognition by the ruling class that there are now too few resources (note how this term removes these things from the web of life) to support the valorization of capital through development of all human society, and the deliberate decision to sacrifice as many as are necessary to perpetuate that class power. The biosphere is collateral damage. The philosophy of exterminism is aprs moi, le deluge (after me, the flood). This declaration of aristocratic nihilism allegedly uttered by Louis XV seems particularly fitting in the wake of the US states response to post-Katrina New Orleans. It is as Jeffrey St. Clair calls it in Grand Theft Pentagon capitalisms last utopia. Exterminism, in fact, marks a nihilist utopia. This is not a general utopia wrought by capitalism, as it turns out, but a kind of financial-military bacchanalia before the end, which is as the graffiti said in the biological-apocalypse film, 28 Days Later extremely fucking nigh. This utopia is the utopia of the few, perched in their redoubt, surrounded by the furious unwashed in the final days an aprs moi, le deluge variety of utopia in which the rich devour everything then let future generations suffer the flood. The Loop Many have forgotten if they ever knew that this region of Louisiana was not known just for jazz and crawfish etouffee. It was also referred to as Cancer Alley, a toxic corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans peopled by the mostly-Black poor who 130

worked for the giant petrochemical industries along Interstate10. The region has been a battleground for the environmental justice movement one that combines its environmentalism with a powerful critique of poverty and racism. Exterminism not only makes toxic waste, it treats subjugated nations themselves as toxic waste dumps. Import the good stuff, export the bad stuff. When Hurricane Katrina leapt ashore, past the destroyed barrier islands and decimated wetlands, it took this toxic effluvia, along with the accumulated poison of the Mississippi Valleys nitrosominic industrial agriculture folded into the levee-bound silt, and redistributed it across the entire transformed landscape. These dangers will have to be minimized, and soon, because the Loop, or Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, has been severely damaged. Toxins or no toxins, this port is the only one in the United States that is designed to accept the great oil supertankers from the Persian Gulf. While the bringing to market of a few tens of millions of barrels of stored oil and gasoline may temporarily calm speculators and thus prevent dramatic price spikes, writes Richard Heinberg [The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003) and Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, 2004)], it cannot balance the global supply-and-demand equation for more than a few weeks (the world uses 84 million barrels of oil each day, after all). And once these stores are gone, few nations will have any cushion in the event of other supply threats. Hence Katrina may mark the beginning of the inevitable unraveling of the petroleum-based industrial world system. The United States is the center of that system. Think of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as a gaping wound in the national body. Organisms need a steady flow of energy in order to maintain their ordered existence; a wound is like an intrusion of entropy within the system. When wounded, the body essentially takes energy away from other parts of itself to restore order at the site of injury. In ordinary times, nations as organisms do this very well. But in this case the timing is bad, as energy is scarce anyway (the wound was incurred at the onset of what will soon become a global energy famine); the nation has already been hemorrhaging materiel and trained personnel in Iraq for three years; and the site of the wound couldnt be worse: it is in the part of the national body through which much of its energy enters (the region is home to half the nations refining capacity and almost 30% of production). Thus it seems likely that the available energy may not be sufficient to overcome the entropy that has been introduced; rather than being contained and eliminated, disorder may fester and spread. New Orleans will be rebuilt. It must be: the nation needs a port at the mouth of the Mississippi, and the port needs a city to support and service it. It is one of the few US cities with character and charm, and people will desperately want to return to their homes. The only event likely to prevent rebuilding would be another strong hurricane hitting Louisiana later this season. However, rebuilding will proceed in the context of a national economy that is crippled and perhaps mortally wounded, and a

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global complex system of production and trade that is starting to lose its battle against entropy. Whether Heinbergs prognostications turn out to be as cataclysmic as he suspects (they may), there is little doubt that the US production and refinement capacity have been dealt a serious blow at a critical time. The government and the industry are tight-lipped about the damage wrought by the combination of Katrina and Rita, but the (inadequate) release of emergency reserves from around the world to temporarily staunch the postKatrina hemorrhage is an ominous sign. Just as the Bush administration waived the Davis-Bacon Act to pay post-Katrina reconstruction workers below the prevailing wage, it will work to ensure a vast pool of under-employed and unemployed to accept below-par wages and exposure to the toxic stew of the LOOP to repair it. Poor workers and Black workers and Latino/a workers will be welcome for this task, even as the land speculators move in to the condemned properties of New Orleans in order to gentrify it into a Disneyfied African American cultural theme park too expensive for many of its former residents to live there. In Houston, after homeless storm victims were transported to the Astrodome, the military recruiters moved in. They are having trouble getting volunteers. So they pick through the net, take what they can, and forget about the by-catch. The main contract to rebuild the Port, which is classified as a Naval facility, was given to Halliburton. Halliburton is one of the top three contractors to receive no-bid contracts. Another contractor is Bechtel, closely associated with Republican heavyweight and former Secretary of State George Schultz. Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, have been represented by lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, Bushs former campaign manager and the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who also represented the Shaw Group another winner in the Katrina Reconstruction Sweepstakes. Finally, the biggest contract was awarded to AshBritt, represented by lobbyist and former Mississippi Governor and Bush confidante, Haley Barbour. Given their exemption from paying prevailing wages under the waiver of DavisBacon, and the huge new pool of desperate labor in the region, they stand to make a killing. (As this is written, public pressure from the scandalous nature of these contracts is set to reverse this situation and re-open bidding.) Cronyism and something called unequal exchange are both characteristics of late imperialism and determining factors of exterminism. And they both make rulers brutally stupid. They also make subjects brutally mad. Autonomy & Legitimacy In stable, productive capitalist economies, the state has one overarching objective. It is the ruling classs umpire, pretending to be societys umpire. The capitalist state is owned and operated by the capitalist class. Under conditions of stability and productivity, it represents capital-in-general. This often means that it has to suppress or even eliminate certain fractions of capital whose range of view is limited by its own business cycle in order to ensure continued power by the class as a whole. 132

In the classic Brando film Burn, based loosely on the history of Haiti, the colonial military commander orders an entire island colony set ablaze, including its lucrative sugar plantations, in order to crush a Black proletarian rebellion. One of the islands capitalists pleadingly objects that the commander has wiped out the islands profits. The commander then explains that the destruction of the island is necessary to send the message to other workers on the rest of the colonized islands, and that this pacification is required to ensure profits for all, not just over the next business cycle, but for the next decade. A short story of capital and the state: The New Deal involved quite a lot of suppression of capital, and even semi-socialist programs, to ensure social order for capital in the long term. This so angered some capitalists that they attempted to organize a coup detat against Franklin Roosevelts administration in 1934, which was uncloaked by former Marine Commandant Smedley Butler the most decorated Marine in the United States. Butler was transformed into an anti-imperialist began when he observed poverty-stricken WWI veterans descend on Washington DC in the legendary Bonus March. President Hoover broke up the Bonus Armys Hooverville camp on the DC mall by sending tanks under the command of Eisenhower, Patton, and Macarthur against the vets, killing three people, including an infant. Butler then published his famous War is a Racket, a powerful anti-imperialist tract to this very day. To further describe the capitalist state, we have to put it in the context of a world system now thoroughly integrated under so-called globalization in which core-capitalist economies require the peripheral nation inputs acquired not through the valorization of capital as described by Ricardo and Marx, but through chicanery and plunder, through debt leverage, and through unequal wages paid in countries where the reproduction of the labor force is cheaper due to underdevelopment. It is in this core-periphery dynamic that we can unravel more of the threads connecting ecocide, the racially-polarized and highly militarized response to Katrina, and the military disaster in Iraq. All states in this system are not equal. There is little doubt at this particular conjuncture that the United States has become a kind of metastasized hyper-state, but aside from sheer military power and the levers of a vast global monetary extortion and loan-sharking scheme, what are some of the characteristics of the US state that differentiate it from other core-capitalist countries and from the various peripheral states? The answer to this question revolves around legitimacy. It is glaringly obvious to anyone that the entire police and armed forces of the United States are not even close to capable of controlling the population of the United States if that population were to become hypothetically disobedient. Sheer numbers alone would overwhelm these armed bodies, without even taking into consideration that ours is a heavily armed society. What holds the state together is legitimacy. The state any state has to enroll a substantial portion of its population as full-citizens that is, objectively enjoying the privileges of citizenship and subjectively identifying with the nation giving them some stake in the continuation of the system as it is. Even if whole sections of the polity are not full-citizens, there must be a critical section of the population that sees its interests and privileges tied up with that state. Privilege is a crucial concept here. With privilege goes protection from non-citizens, from feared Others, from outsiders. Even when the state itself promotes the notion of a dangerous Other, and masks plunder of the Other as self defense, there is always the possibility that this Other will become a real threat. A humiliated people will seek both self-defense and revenge. A hopeless ghetto is a great place to get mugged. The state creates enemies real and 133

imagined to consolidate the dependency and loyalty of its full-citizens; but then the state has to ensure protection from these created enemies to retain its legitimacy with those citizens. Protect us from the Ay-rab terrorists. Protect us from the 16-year-old Black kid we call superpredator. So the effective state must retain two characteristics: autonomy and legitimacy. Beyond Clausewitz Mary Kaldor, of the London School of Economics, is a student of war. She subscribes to what I believe is a crackpot theory of global cosmopolitanism, but she has written insightfully if in a fragmentary and eurocentric way about the evolution of something she calls the new war. The construction of these public monopolies [states] was intimately bound up with war against other states, writes Kaldor in her essay, Cosmopolitanism and organized violence. Inter-state war became the only legitimate form of organised violence and, moreover, was sharply distinguished from peace. In place of more or less continuous warfare, war became a discrete episode that was reserved for use against other states and was excluded from internal relations. Domestic pacification (the elimination of private armies, the reduction of corruption, violent crime, piracy and brigandage), the growth of taxation and public borrowing, the regularisation of armed forces and police forces, the development of nationalist sentiment, were all mutually reinforcing in wartime. Essentially, the social contract associated with the construction of the nation-state could be said to have taken the following form; civil and political rights were guaranteed in exchange for paying taxes and fighting in wars. The individual rights that citizens enjoyed in peacetime were exchanged for the abrogation of those rights in wartime. In wartime, the citizens became part of a collectivity, the nation, and had to be ready to die for the state. In exchange for individual civil and political rights in peacetime, the citizen accepted a kind of unlimited liability in wartime. Hence, Elias, writing just before the Second World War, feared that the civilising process would be engulfed by the barbarity of war. Inter-state war is sometimes described as Clausewitzean war. The wars of classical modernity had a kind of extremist logic that is well analysed by Clausewitz. As war became more extreme and terrible, so the social contract was extended, reaching its logical end point during the Cold War period. Essentially, during this period, there were unprecedented gains in economic and social rights. But the risks were also dramatically extended. The price of these gains, during this period, was readiness to risk a nuclear war. This process was disrupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the combined shocks of recession, the Vietnam War, and the OPEC oil embargo. It was during and immediately after this period that the United States began a radical transformation from a 134

productive-economy hegemon into a nation that ruled the world by nuclear threats, loansharking to the periphery, and remarkably its own debtor status, using dollar hegemony to extort un-payable loans from fellow capitalist core states. The crisis of capitalism brought with it a crisis of socialism and national liberation, because these projects were always fully contained inside the capitalist world system. The continual assaults on the economies and states of these projects militarized them resistance became barracks socialism. Stalin was not a phenomenon of socialism, but of capitalism the terrible combination of domestic underdevelopment and hostile capitalist encirclement. An entire society was transformed into a military organization to prevent not capitalism which was not what the West held in store for Russia but Africanization. The intent of the West, with which Hitler put himself in competition, was to squeeze the last drop of value out of Russia and cast it aside to rot afterward, a goal that was almost accomplished with Yeltsin as a US puppet in the 1990s. Stalin met with exterminism. (Mostly in the conduct of WWII, however more than 25 million killed in the war. The numbers of those executed by Stalins regime are grotesquely inflated as a form of popular wisdom in the west, with numbers reaching into the tens of millions. The best estimates of those actually executed, which included both purges and ordinary criminal executions with most killed during the 1937-38 bloodbath [680,692] are that there were a total of 727,271 executions from 1929 until the start of the war. The grossly inflated and discredited figures generated by Robert Conquest were commissioned by archanticommunist William Randolph Hearst to prove that communism was worse than Nazism. This in no way serves as an apology for Stalins purges and show-trials, but merely to set the record straight.) The crisis of capitalism was a crisis of the capitalist state, and the socialist states coexisted with them in an inter-state political system. Just as the large-scale complexity (Cuba is an exception precisely because of its small scale.) of the Soviet Union and China required exposure to international capital, it obliged these states to expose themselves to loss of legitimacy if they were perceived as non-autonomous or incapable of protecting citizens. The former was exhausted in its attempt to create socialism in one country, and the latter has transformed itself as part of a long-term development strategy into an archipelago of Dickensian sweatshops that are now the envy (and sometimes the province) of western capitalists. Earlier struggles for state power were planned on a map of the state. But the actual terrain represented on a symbolic map can change. Then we get lost. During the period under review, the US covert operations establishment cribbing from the Israeli conquest of Palestine, and its own experience with state-destruction in Africa began deploying surrogates around the world to dismantle the autonomy of peripheral states who resisted US demands. Autonomy and legitimacy go hand in hand. Neoliberalism is in its very essence the antithesis of peripheral state autonomy, even on behalf of these states national elites. All decisions about future development are circumscribed by the Holy Trinity of neoliberalism Debt-leverage, Privatization, and Export-economy. National autarky is off the table. In the event that any state attempted to resist this imperial assault on its autonomy as in Yugoslavia and Iraq then covert operatives from the CIA to the National Endowment for Democracy begin to destabilize

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the target state for the purpose of delegitimating it, followed by the coup de grace where necessary of a military strike. The combination of privatisation and globalisation can give rise to a process, which is almost the reverse of the process through which modern states were constructed. Corruption and clientilism leads to an erosion of the tax revenue base because of declining legitimacy and growing incapacity to collect tax and because of declining investment (both public and private) and, consequently, production. The declining tax revenue leads to growing dependence both on external sources and on private sources, through, for example, rent seeking or criminal activities. Reductions in public expenditure as a result of the shrinking fiscal base as well as pressures from external donors for macro-economic stabilisation and liberalisation (which also may reduce export revenues) further erodes legitimacy. A growing informal economy associated with increased inequalities, unemployment and rural-urban migration, combined with the loss of legitimacy, weakens the rule of law and may lead to the re-emergence of privatised forms of violence - organised crime and the substitution of protection for taxation, vigilantes, private security guards protecting economic facilities, especially international companies, para-military groups associated with particular political factions. In particular, reductions in security expenditure, often encouraged by external donors for the best of motives, may lead to break away groups of redundant soldiers and policemen seeking alternative employment. (Kaldor) Kaldor partially overlooks the role of the US state in creating the conditions for these new wars, but she describes what they look like very well. The above description could be Russia, it could be Kosovo, or it could be Afghanistan. It could also be seen in Blackwater mercenaries invading post-Katrina New Orleans. The United States itself having pillaged its own accounts for Wall Street and adopted a private-sector-does-it-better ideology has now begun extensively using mercenaries. These are the circumstances that give rise to the new wars. It is the lack of authority of the state, the weakness of representation, the loss of confidence that the state is able or willing to respond to public concerns, the inability and/or unwillingness to regulate the privatisation and informalisation of violence that gives rise to violent conflicts. [It remains interesting that Kaldor does not mention the US itself in this description blinded by her extreme euro(American)centrism.] Moreover, this uncivilising process, tends to be reinforced by the dynamics of the conflicts, which have the effect of further reordering political, economic and social relationships in a negative spiral of incivility. I call the conflicts wars because of their political character although they could also be described as massive violations of human rights (repression against civilians) and organised crime (violence for private gain). They are about access to state power. They are violent struggles to gain 136

access to or to control the state. As the state becomes privatised, that is to say, it shifts from being the main organisation for societal regulation towards an instrument for the extraction of resources by the ruler and his (and it is almost always his) privileged networks, so access to state power becomes a matter of inclusion or exclusion, even, in the latter case, of survival. In the majority of cases, these wars are fought in the name of identity a claim to power on the basis of labels. These are wars in which political identity is defined in terms of exclusive labels ethnic, linguistic, or religious and the wars themselves give meaning to the labels. Labels are mobilised for political purposes; they offer a new sense of security in a context where the political and economic certainties of previous decades have evaporated. They provide a new populist form of communitarian ideology, a way to maintain or capture power, that uses the language and forms of an earlier period. Undoubtedly, these ideologies make use of preexisting cleavages and the legacies of past wars. It is also the case that the appeal to tradition and the nostalgia for some mythical or semi-mythical history gains strength in the social upheavals associated with the opening up to global pressures. But nevertheless, it is the deliberate manipulation of these sentiments, often assisted by Diaspora funding and techniques and speeded up through the electronic media, that is the immediate cause of conflict. In these wars, violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. Violence is mainly directed against civilians and not another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than military success. And political control is maintained through terror, through expulsion or elimination of those who challenge political control, especially those with a different label. Population displacement, massacres, widespread atrocities are not just side effects of war; they are a deliberate strategy for political control [note Israel]. The tactic is to sow the fear and hate on which exclusive identity claims rest. (Kaldor) Here is the line connecting the Rwandan massacres, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the appeal of Osama bin Laden (who has proven smarter by orders of magnitude than anyone in the Bush administration). And it is the line connecting these instances to their epoch, one of a protracted crisis of capital a permanent overproduction crisis that forces the acceleration of the plunder against the peripheries, and the desperate preservation of the US as the worlds consumer base a base dancing on an overhang above a deepening chasm of personal debt to sop up that overproduction in an orgy of technological bread-and-circuses. It is not fully fruited yet. The US state still requires the withering fig leaf of spreading democracy to the terrifying dark Ay-rabs to legitimate its attempt to militarily cordon the global oil patch. But this is the basis of what Chalmers Johnson and others describe as blowback. The policies of the US created terrorism for its own purposes, and has inexorably expanded the stateless milieu of (the cipher) al Qaeda in the interstices of the world system now deeply in the grasp of exterminism the policy and ideology of mass displacement and death. But the blowback goes far deeper than Johnson describes. 137

The new wars are no longer discrete in time and space. The various actors states, remnants of states, para-military groups, liberation movements, etc. depend on continued violence for both political and economic reasons. Cease-fires and agreements are truces, breathing spaces, which do not address the underlying social relations the social conditions of war and peace are not much different. The networks of politicians, security forces, legal and illegal trading groups, which are often transnational, constitute a new distorted social formation, which has a tendency to spread through refugees and displaced persons, identity based networks often crossing continents, as well as criminal links. Moreover, the conditions which give rise to the new wars and which are exacerbated by them, exist in weaker forms in most urban conglomerations in the world and indeed often have direct links with the most violent regions. (Kaldor) This doesnt merely describe the Afghan-Pakistani border. It increasingly describes the US government itself. The US state finds itself captured by a clique that fails completely to see how they are undermining the states ability to act autonomously confusing that with the ability of the executive branch to act with impunity. In David Harvey's The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003), where he had a very clear way of describing the state-capital contradiction: The logic of territory vs the logic of capital. The former is geographically fixed, while the latter is necessarily more and more and more mobile, chasing across the globe. Kaldor has missed this contradiction entirely in her obsessive avoidance of class. The flag follows the dollar, and the troops follow the flag, said Smedley Butler. Iraq today does not any longer represent part of the master plan. The plan was to hop from one regime change to the next, resetting the grand chessboard for capital's next period of accelerated accumulation. But the fixed-geography of the state at home, with its requirement to retain legitimacy, is increasingly at loggerheads with the tar-baby geography of Iraq. The dollar still wants to move. But the flag and the troops are embattled in a asymmetric quagmire that is very definitely bounded by the geopolitical outline of Iraq. Capital now finds itself in the service of a state emergency... not vice versa. It's time for us to get our heads around this state-capital contradiction, not only because this is where the fault lines are appearing in the ruling class, but because in its specificity this contradiction points increasingly because of this administration's lethal mix of machismo and incompetence toward an extremely violent period in the first half of the 21st Century, that could easily become nuclear when the US state finds itself backed into a corner. The Crony-Warfare State The latest in a series of scandals being tamped down with the able assistance of the mainstream media is the indictment of the Texan Bush-crony, Congressman Tom DeLay, on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. While this relates to the whole question of legitimacy, it is not (yet) a political crisis. The interesting thing about DeLay at least for me is his background. DeLay is known for his scorched earth political tactics; he is even admired for his ruthlessness. 138

Before he went into politics, he was a Houston exterminator. The Texas Toreador refers to him as the Bugman of Sugarland. What can we infer about a government that heads up its own most representative federal body with a man who made his living spraying poison on bugs? Reichsfuhrer Heimlich Himmler was a failed chicken farmer. This stratum has long been the birthplace of sociopathic reaction. Lets compare warfare to pest extermination. Both are instrumental in the extreme accomplishing what they set out to do with little to no regard for tangential consequences. They both objectify life for the purpose of taking it. They both expose their foot soldiers (DeLay was never that) to the hazards of operation. And they are both ecological travesties. When I stated that the US is no longer a productive economy, it was of course hyperbole. Things are still made here. The recent obsession about intellectual property rights is a response by the state to the needs of biotechnology and communications technology sectors. Classical economists see commodity-production as a question of balance. Does the nation export more than it imports, or vice versa. By all classical economist accounts, if a nation imports much more than it exports, its currencys buying power is endangered. By many mainstream political accounts, so is that nations security, especially when massive debts are incurred to support that nations continued expenditures as its currency zooms across the planet chasing cheaply made commodities. Anti-Semitic, xeno-homo-phobe Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon aide who has professed admiration for Franco, has been warning that Chinas growing pool of US debt has given the worlds most populous nation a grip on the trachea of the US economy. But thats not true, and the Chinese no chumps know this better than anyone. China, like Japan and other US debt-holders, know that selling the dollar short would crash their own central bank reserves, which are flush with T-bills. Its a game of financecapital chicken. Moreover, who would buy Chinese products in the USs place? The dollar-economy is worldwide. We all bluff together or we fall off the bluff together. And if this Gordian knot is cut, it will mean war. Thats the secret of the USs dematerialized economy, which I, along with many others, have written about in more detail elsewhere. The economy is not dematerialized at all. You are likely reading this on a material computer, nibbling on material food, dressed in material clothes, and inside a material house. There has been an international division of economic labor realized, in which the US consumer is required to buy Wal-Marts shit, which is made in China or some other Dickensian paradise, in order to complete the virtuous cycle of global capital. The transnational ruling class is largely American. It is transnational because it operates overseas, not because it is diverse. With the military power of the United States to ensure its overseas assets, and dollar hegemony to ensure the repatriation of currency, they have moved productive platforms offshore to widen profit margins, driven by their own cannibalistic competition. US exports are relatively low, but US capitalists have five times more assets overseas than they do in the US itself. But there has to be some production in the domestic economy, even when dollarhegemony makes the stuff we build too expensive for other nations people to buy and ourselves, too. There has to be some kind of market for the stuff produced more expensively in the US, so the US state creates surrogate markets (in the face of its own grand pronouncements 139

about the invisible hand of supply-and-demand). The US massively subsidizes its agricultural exports to the outrage of the rest of the world that the US consistently punishes for the same thing. And the US has created a huge and cancerously growing consumer surrogate for other goods, and that is the Department of Defense. Much of this materiel is pure shit, by the way, making many high-dollar weapons systems a cosmic money-sink. Lockheed-Martins F-22, for example, is the most expensive airplane in the world ($300 million a copy). Its legions of detractors which include many former fighter pilots call it Tiffanys on wings. Not only does it constitute a waste of many rare minerals and a history of corrupt contracts and cost overruns, the US has had to bribe other nations with more money to get them to buy the thing. It has never performed correctly, and will likely never see combat unless someone blows one up on the airfield doing its pilot a tremendous favor. Now theres a support the troops concept! Lockheed-Martin pulls in an average of $228 per American household every year. Agri-subsidies and weapons contracts go hand in hand. We can starve em or we can shoot em. Peripheral nations are increasingly incapable of food self-sufficiency because they entire economies are directed to getting dollars (through export) to pay usurious perpetual debts denominated in those dollars. Then they have to float further loans to buy subsidized food produced in the US. Very tricky. New Orleans is the major US export terminal for both agricultural products (60%) and military technology (The largest buyer is Israel, but the US peddles military technology around the world even knowing we will eventually see it used against us.). When the port closed in the wake of Katrina, these industries both made panicked calls to Washington which threw gas on the fire of no-bid reconstruction contracts for the Bush administrations buddies. This port is so critical that the Export Administration Act prohibits any boycott activity against it to include prohibiting interaction with countries that are involved in boycott-like activity against Israel. WECO Agencies, a Louisiana firm, was fined last year by the US government for a 1993 trade with Lebanon when that country still boycotted Israel. Of course, the biggest purchaser of US-manufactured military hardware is the US state itself. It is a massive shell game of no-bid, cost-plus contracts, the pillaging of the public sector to increase defense spending, and the aforementioned international debt profligacy. In the unhidden costs of war spending, the US government spends the equivalent of $6,000 a year for every man, woman, and child in the country. Hmmm. Maybe the war-tax resisters are onto something. In 1997, I was at a meeting at Chapel Hill about organizing the Labor Party. Left luminaries with roots in the labor movement were there, and there was a sense that this, at last, was the idea that would break through the post-1990 metropolitan malaise that smoldered off the collapse of the Soviet Union and the embrace of Dickensian capitalism by China. It was octogenarian pacifist and physicist Joe Straley who elected to be the skunk at this party, if youll indulge my zoological allusions, by asking, Does anyone notice the elephant in this living room? He was talking, of course, about the fact that the Labor Party program mentioned not one word about either war or the bloated US war industry. The reason, of course, reluctantly admitted by Adolph Reed who was there as a Labor Party rep, is that there is 140

scarcely a productive industry of any scale left in the United States that is not vitally linked to what is satirically referred to as defense spending. Even if the company is not Northrop Grumman or Lockheed-Martin, who make the majority of their money on high-dollar weapons contracts, there are innumerable companies who rely on the contract for ripstop nylon, Angora goats (used as patient models in medical training), eggs (to prepare a million breakfasts each day), dehydrated strawberries and the list goes on almost endlessly for the margin of profit upon which they depend to remain viable as capitalist enterprises. The US economy, quite literally, would collapse if the Department of Defense closed down. This is a very tough pill to swallow for pacifists, leftists, deep-libertarians, and others who might like to see precisely that. It is not a happy circumstance that our very social stability is now predicated upon military power (which is being called into serious question in Southwest Asia right now) but also on the Romanesque venality of defense contractors and the parade of generals who enter their ranks upon completion of uniformed service. This form of military Keynesianism as it is inaccurately called has been going on to one degree or another since the end of WWII, but it has been expanded dramatically as a compensatory measure ever since the crisis of the late 60s and early 70s. Extraterrestrial anthropologists who are dispassionate about outcomes may be watching us right now, wondering what happens when the key maritime export facility for US agricultural products is closed down by a hurricane, the vast majority of the population is turning against an oil war that has already been lost, a million new displaced persons are poised as long term unemployed in a frangible shell-game economy, racial-national contradictions have been suddenly exposed by a disastrous and racist occupation of an American city (posing as a relief effort), more fictional value will be inevitably pumped into the world economy in the form of more un-payable loans to the US through its treasury bills, and the Visa-card storm clouds gather over middle America now hefting the greatest personal debt burden in the history of the species. Escape to the Sunbelt The principles however contradictory of liberal democracy that are associated with productive capitalist economy were rendered obsolete by the crisis of the early 70s, when that crisis was resolved the only way available, by lifting the controls off of the financial pole placed there in the wake of the Great Depression. Peter Gowan, writing for Critical Asian Studies in September 2005 (Triumphing Toward International Disaster) noted that it is far from obvious that a state devoted officially to the social power and values of the business class and openly and directly controlled by the leaders of that class is actually the optimal form of capitalist state. It can, instead, become a state devoted to the immediate gratification of the desires of business people to the exclusion of all the other considerations that a capitalist state should concern itself with. There are plenty of symptoms of this kind of problem at the present time. The emergence of leaderships capable of resisting immediate gratification of the business class in the name of longer-term goals that require reorganizations unpalatable to powerful business coalitions is very difficult in the United States. While Gowan cites the defeat of William Jennings Bryant by William McKinley for president in 1896 as the nodal point for the first triumph of American business ideology, 141

the post-WWII reassertion of this ideology as a real political force comes with the election of Ronald Reagan the first post-WWII president to bury the nation in debts to aggrandize giant weapons contractors. The military budget has acted as a crucial counter-cyclical fiscal policy tool in macroeconomic management a functional alternative to a large welfare state repertoire of instruments. Military spending has also acted as an important lever of industrial policy by offering a protected state market for large industrial sectors, ranging from aircraft manufacturers like Boeing to the big car companies and many other, largely civilian sectors, as well as armaments contractors. Military spending has also acted as a very important center of state research and development (R&D) spending, which, though formally devoted to military R&D (plus dual use R&D during the Clinton period), in reality provides a central mechanism for generating new high-tech sectors in the national civilian economy. Military spending has also been an important way of binding the American South into the American state through the large role of southerners in the military, the large numbers of U.S. bases in the South and Sun-Belt states, and the significant military-industrial activity in the South/Sun-Belt (in addition to California). The defeat in Vietnam did lead to a serious split in the governing elites of the American state in the 1970s, but the militarization of the United States was not, in the end, reversed. On the contrary, it was eventually reinforced by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. (Gowan) It is interesting that Gowan talks about the Sunbelt in this regard, because this is the region that includes East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi where we just saw the face of malevolent racialized neglect in the wake of two storms. It is also where two other significant things happened that conditioned this shameless exercise of exterminism within the boundaries of the United States. It is where Richard Nixon who oversaw the (exterminist) last stages of the US occupation Vietnam led the Republican Party to capture the mantle of party of white supremacy from Southern Democrats, a process that was capped off this year when Tom DeLay and the Texas Republican Party redistricted Texas to ensure Republican Congressional majorities there into perpetuity. The militarization and political re-ascendancy of the Sunbelt are but two symptoms of a deeper historical process. Privilege and Colonization One cant help but ponder not just the obvious about the Gulf Coasts National Guards that were off in Iraq during Katrina, whose members had to sit by helplessly wondering about their own families, neighbors, friends, but about how much relief could be provided, and how effective an evacuation might have been mounted if the total assets of the US military had been available and put to use. 142

Cuba evacuated 1.4 million people in advance of Hurricane Dennis, a Category 4 storm that hit them in July, and suffered 16 fatalities (the greatest number for any storm in Cuba since 1963). Thats because Cuba not only invests in disaster preparation and strong civil defense, but because there is a social commitment to medical infrastructure, high literacy levels, and government support of community organizers, to mention a few of the reasons. We did the free-market evacuation, an unenforceable order for people to leave under their own power by private automobile after it was too late. Cuba is resource poor. The United States is resource rich. Figure it out. An Oxfam report on Cubas response system notes the following as intangibles that make the difference: social cohesion and solidarity (self-help and citizen-based social protection at the neighborhood level) trust between authorities and civil society political commitment to risk reduction good coordination, information-sharing, and cooperation among institutions involved in risk reduction attention to the most vulnerable population attention to lifeline structures (concrete procedures to save lives, evacuation plans, and so on) investment in human development an effective risk communication system and institutionalized historical memory of disasters, laws, regulations, and directives to support all of the above investments in economic development that explicitly take potential consequences for risk reduction or increase into account investment in social capital investment in institutional capital (e.g. capable, accountable, and transparent government institutions for mitigating disasters)

The reaction of the US government to Katrina was an ugly snapshot of exterminism. Youre on your own if youre poor (and especially Black), too fucking bad. There was also no more stark a picture of the African American national question, to my mind, than seeing Black families in New Orleans roaming through the poisonous floodwaters in search of survival. African America is only one disaster away from thirdworld status, and we can see clearly how Black people are the vast, vast majority of those who were left behind, without transportation, by the free-market evacuation. The white citizens of the region managed by and large to get out. The Black Nation was left to fend for itself. The poor whites among these refugees have been effectively excluded from the citizenship in the US by their class, but the fact that they are white does not change the essential reality of race as a national question discernable only through the twin lenses of privilege and colonization. Looking at the whole question in light of Katrinas aftermath, it becomes much more difficult to shazam away the national reality we witnessed on the devastated Gulf Coast. Historically, empirically, dialectically, subjectively doesnt make a bit of difference which method you use, the scenes from places like New Orleans, 80% under a toxic soup 143

that the EPA has said couldnt be cleaned up with the equivalent of the US Gross National Product, are scenes from the African Diaspora and scenes from a colonized nation. Jordan Flaherty, reporting from the zone on September 2nd , wrote: In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp. I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me as someone whos been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You dont want to be here at night. In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp. I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I 144

spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me as someone whos been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You dont want to be here at night. folks. I cannot imagine this plan for a destitute mass this size if they were mostly white

Or such a response. On the news, white families foraging through flooded convenience stores for food and water were said to be recovering food. Black families doing exactly the same thing were called looters. The organs of commodified information were clamoring for control of this deracinated mass of black bodies get law and order back, even though the city is gone, was a more urgent cry than finding those who were still trapped in their sweltering attics, slowly dying of dehydration and vascular collapse children the most vulnerable. Bush spoke on September 2nd in response to the mounting wrath at how the Federal government has responded, and all he could think of to say was, We are going to restore order in the city of New Orleans. He knows his white-nationalist base well, and that was all he had left.New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, at his wits end with diplomatic restraint had to be bleeped on the radio when he said, They dont have any fucking idea whats going on! Louisianas Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu, a fully-owned political subsidiary of the oil industry, was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper of CNN on September 1st. Cooper, news model offspring of the Vanderbilts, had been immersed in the post-Katrina reality of New Orleans for four days prior to the interview, and the reality had pierced the shell of privilege around his own heart. Landrieu offered some insipid remark about Anderson, tonight, I don't know if you've heard maybe you all have announced it but Congress is going to an unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating. Excuse me, Senator, interrupted Cooper, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians slap you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up. Even from the mouths of the press. such was the hellishness of these scene to the innocent sheltered eyes of white America. Rats eating corpses. The emergence of the American Empire has taken a terrible toll on many people, many nations. Ill be the last to argue for competitive oppressions. Each was unique in its particulars, and each the same in its purpose the capitalist must continue to make money, continue to expand, and the capitalist state must continue to ensure his access to materials and most critically human beings to work and valorize his capital. 145

When people are excess to that process, when they become surplus people, they are sent away and left to die exterminism. In New Orleans, where there was 40% illiteracy in the Black Nation, and a terrible job shortage, petty crime and drug use were survival industries that also serve to feed the Dantean slave-mill of Angola State Penitentiary. Now, with Katrina and poverty displacing them, we can pretty well expect the speculators and developers to come in and make good on Bushs weird promise today that this would lead to a more beautiful Gulf Coast. First slaves, then sharecroppers, then meatpackers, then service workers and convicts now Indians thrown off the land. The Black Nation is a colony of the United States, as is the Brown Nation now reforging itself within the mass of multiple Latin American Diasporans in the Sunbelt. Past as Present What is unique about African America is that this nation traces back a history of captive immigration. There were no potbellied Minutemen volunteering to guard the border and prevent them coming in. The market had resolved the question of how to make a proletarian an instant and complete 24/7 commodity. Import-slavery. We can say whatever we want to claim this is merely the past, but the descendants of these Africans did not draw a single property line on an expropriated continent. The white bourgeoisie and white became the national-racial identity, since it no more a scientific category than bodily humors drew the lines, passed out the land they had expropriated by force of arms, and proceeded by fits and starts to construct the intergenerational wealth that today can be counted not anecdotally, but statistically. White net worth in the United States is 14 times that of Black net worth, and when a Katrina happens, this translates into the capacity to escape, to re-establish some measure of autonomy, and to reconstruct ones life. It reflects the ability of families apart from the disaster to intervene and assist with that recovery. During Reconstruction, when the Black nation was being forged out of the charred remains of Atlanta and the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, New Orleans became a unique place in that nation. African Americans managed to gain a toehold in the city, even in the face of renewed white racial terrorism with the 1877 collapse of Reconstruction. And before the Civil Rights movement achieved many of its national goals, as early as the 1950s, the Black community of New Orleans had established a complex institutional infrastructure that gave this community political influence. During Reconstruction, Blacks established churches. White churches that allowed them at all, still clinging to the markers of white privilege, segregated white and Black in the church. So the Black church became the focal point of Black collectivity. Social, economic, and political leadership in Black communities sprang from the independent Black church. The Black church linked blacks across lines of occupation, income, and prewar status offered the better off the opportunity for wholesome and respectable association, provided the poor with a modicum of economic insurance, and opened positions of community leadership to men of modest backgrounds. (Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Illustrate edition, latest printing 2002)

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Through the coming decades of shifting social conflict, high spots and low, to the present day, the independent Black church has persevered as the locus of community life for good and ill where a distinct community identity was forged in resistance to the pressures of persistent white supremacy. It would also be the most reliable Black institution within the white-capitalist society. Blacks would never control the means of social production, so Black churches became the vehicle for social mobility, and therefore the occasional battleground for power within the Black community. The church became a point of resistance to white supremacy, and at other times, opportunist leadership within the church would collaborate with the white elites. The Black church quickly developed into a patriarchal establishment where internal battles between liberation and accommodation trends, which corresponded to the interests of developing classes among Blacks, would be fought out. Such is the nature of colonialism. Read Fanon. More than any other factor, the intractable nature of white supremacy as a practice would maintain the solidarity of these institutions through all their internal tensions. And it was this gradual recognition by Blacks in the United States that they would never be allowed an equal partnership even with so-called white allies that led to the emergence of Black nationalism. This idea was a direct reflection of the lived experience of Blacks, now cohering into a homogeneous community that was only still partly African and not fully integrated as American, but African American. With the decisive defeat of Reconstruction, and the literal consignment of African Americans to colonial status within the South with codified segregation, Black national consciousness put down deep roots that persist to this day. Those who claim there is no direct line from slavery to the present are not only wrong, they are trying to jump over Jim Crow. Slavery ended in 1863. It took Jim Crow another 100 years to reach its legal end, and it has been re-imposed through economic warfare since then. It wasnt long after the end of Reconstruction that Black nationalism became explicit, and with it pan-Africanism. Garvey and DuBois leapt onto the scene, one emphasizing the national character of Black America and the other talking about unity across the African Diaspora pan-Africanism. These currents became the theoretical expressions of the lived experience of national oppression and collective solidarity for African America. Torn from their African history, yet struggling to make their way after manumission in North America, Black people in the United States at the turn of the 20th Century were neither wholly African nor incorporated with full citizenship into the American social and political body. Yet there was a distinct and cohesive community that had emerged in the interstice of Reconstruction along the former plantation stronghold of the Black Belt, and that community oppressed, exploited, and reviled as it was maintained its distinctive coherence as a both a colonized people and a self-supporting community. It was Fanons settler-native construction turned on its head. It took Garvey to call it a nation, but it took DuBois to point out that a national minority could not pursue a struggle for self-determination against a national majority except in an international context across the African Diaspora, and linked to the anticolonial struggles around the rest of the world. Oppression built the Black Nation in the South, and privilege built the White Nation throughout the United States. 147

Privilege blinded the white working class to their latent solidarity with Black workers, and not only the trade union movement, but many white-led revolutionary formations that were midwifed out of the Great Depression either actively excluded Black participation or relegated the Black Freedom Movement to a secondary status. Privilege is vehemently denied by most white people, but the reason privilege is repeatedly acknowledged in the overwhelming rejection of the modern Republican Party by Black folk regardless of class is that this privilege is felt on their skin. The sharp variance between Black and white net worth, the stark differences in mean income, and the population demographics of the American prison system, are all visible manifestations not of mere prejudice, but of structural colonialism. Just as there is unequal exchange between the core and the periphery in the world system, that unequal exchange exists inside the US and is one source of material privilege for its white citizens. The difference between white and Black in the USA is the difference between citizen and subject. The privileged victories of the white working class over and against the Black, Brown, and even Asian workers have been Pyrrhic. The existence of the South as the preserve of white reaction created the refuge to which Northern industry retreated from powerful, Northern-based, white-male led unions, and now the United States has the lowest unionization levels of any core nation. Whats left of the labor movement are a collection of feuding white men splitting the AFL-CIO this year who share a history of selling out their own membership in a bureaucratic orgy of collaboration with the bosses, and fusion with an ever-more-inept and marginalized Democratic Party. The shift of political dominance to the American South and Sunbelt was based directly on privilege and colonization. This is the history that culminated in Anderson Cooper observing rats feeding on the floating corpse of a woman on September 1, 2005. This is the essence of colonization and the basis of a struggle for national liberation. Under the Republican Party after Nixons Southern Strategy, the war profiteers were effectively re-merged with the ideology of white supremacy, and they have achieved their zenith under this administration. Alf Hornborg describes imperial privilege as the entitlement to appropriate [the verb] space and time, and he describes the imperial-core/exploitable-periphery relation as one where the core imports wealth and orderliness, while it exports disorder, poverty, and waste. The white citizens of New Orleans and who can blame them jumped in their vehicles, gassed up, and headed north away from Katrinas ruthless power. They appropriated space and time, using the universal equivalent of money. Those without the money and the cars, they are left behind, trapped in space and time to face the social disorder and to wade through the carcinogens, mutagens, and embryotoxins. The material basis for all society is a finite planet subjected to the needs now of almost 7 billion people. The political viability of the current regime is based on preserving the privileges and illusions of the American White Nation its political base. So the exported disorder in the peripheries inexorably encroaches on the core nations space as the pace of extraction and exploitation is augmented. The cities fill to bursting with ever more sullen masses. War itself is transformed from discrete if deadly episodes between nations to the war of a transnational ruling class headquartered in a hyper-state against throngs of billions economic war, cultural war, and offensive war.

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When that fails, they will go after the White workers who will have been the former middle class. If they come for me in the morning, they will come back for you in the afternoon. New War Order Economic life produces a state in its own image. When the economic life of a nation is based on permanent warfare, then the mode of warfare becomes imprinted on the character of the state. That is why Kaldors description of new war is useful, even if she confuses its manifestations with its causes. One difference between Reagan and Bush II is that the Cold War, which served as the basis of American core-capitalist supremacy as security guarantor disappeared. The huge military apparatus of the US, built up for that conflict, is now being seized upon as the primary instrument to reassert American supremacy over the world, when the former bases of that supremacy industrial export production and the dependence of other core capitalists for American military power to face down socialist and national liberation threats have withered away. Gowan remarks on the issue of capitalist state autonomy: [I]t is far from obvious that a state devoted officially to the social power and values of the business class and openly and directly controlled by the leaders of that class is actually the optimal form of capitalist state. It can, instead, become a state devoted to the immediate gratification of the desires of business people to the exclusion of all the other considerations that a capitalist state should concern itself with. There are plenty of symptoms of this kind of problem at the present time. The emergence of leaderships capable of resisting immediate gratification of the business class in the name of longer-term goals that require reorganizations unpalatable to powerful business coalitions is very difficult in the United States. It is the combination of this administrations militarism and its inability to curb the dominant classs demands for instant gratification that give the Bush regime its unique and uniquely dangerous character not just to the people at large in the world, but to the transnational business class (as a class) itself. Gowans essay refutes the pop theory of many anti-globalists that transnational capitals are actually detaching themselves from the state. It has been fashionable amongst some globalization theorists to claim that the transnational capitalists have broken with their own territorial state. This seems very wide of the mark as far as the relations between American transnational capitalism and the American state are concerned. This sector of American capitalists has, through its representatives, controlled the American state for decades, has invested large amounts of money in politics to maintain this control, and has shown

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something like hysteria at the prospect of political forces hostile to its transnational interests gaining power within the United States. And this political posture has surely been a rational one from their angle. After all, the American state has worked tirelessly to open other jurisdictions to these internationalist American capitals, to further their implantation abroad and their interests abroad in a thousand ways. And if history has taught capitalists one thing about investments abroad, it has surely taught the importance of projecting the power of their state to protect their capitals from hostile forces in other states. All this suggests that the relationship between American transnational capitalists and the American state remains that of robust, mutual loyalty. One key empirical test of this would surely be to see whether this (dominant) wing of the American capitalist class has worked to build new, supranational institutions for enforcing their property rights internationally, over and above the American state. There is not the slightest evidence of this. Another would be to see whether the American state has worked to penalize the transnational expansion of American capitals. Again, no evidence of this exists. At the end of the day, capital still requires its armed forces, and this requires the American state. Pax Americana, quipped I.F. Stone, is the internationalism of Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan, and the Pentagon. Symbiosis. It is the contradiction emerging between the US military as the enforcement arm of transnational capital immediately and the use of military power to play the central role in long-term post-Cold War restructuring which has overstretched it that has run headlong into the economic contradictions created by a state that needs to expand its military spending even as it bleeds the public treasury as a rescue-offering to transnational financial speculators, Kaldors rentiers who now dominate the international financial agenda with what Gowan calls the Dollar-Wall Street Regime. Military overstretch has long been a feature of the post-WWII US empire, beginning with Korea and Vietnam and also with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. At each juncture, the US has struggled to reassert the myth of American military invincibility. Iraq is different because, as the administration is fond of saying, it is the main front in the war on terror. Once you remove the euphemism war on terror and substitute the term global battlefield or new war, this becomes a remarkably honest account. The fact that the US is losing that main battle is also true, and defines the military aspect of Washingtons latent political crisis. Military overstretch is the direct expression of the state-capital contradiction: The state is bounded by geography, and capital can respect no geographic boundaries in its ceaseless need to expand. In fact, members of this administration have been remarkably honest about their ambitions openly declaring the entire earth a battlefield and their intention to fight on that battlefield for decades. Terrorist is simply a euphemism for those who resist, or those who must be strategically targeted. Autonomy is the essence of sovereignty. Wars on popular sovereignty are wars on the people themselves. Even with the US development of precision weapons that theoretically reduce the collateral damage of war, we see the employment of those

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weapons to target social infrastructure to the casualties become casualties of starvation and medical neglect, removed in space and time from the explosions. The logic of exterminism is not precision, regardless of the hardware. It is deracination and extermination. It is the emergence of states that have collapsed from their own lack of autonomy (as in Africa), states that attempted to reassert their autonomy and were destroyed in the effort to impose discipline on them (Yugoslavia and Iraq), states that are attempting to reassert autonomy (China and Iran), states that are chafing at the mismatch between US hegemony and their own ambitions (Western Europe and Russia), and the introduction of powerful non-state actors (like bin Laden, et al) all these outgrowths of US post-Cold War restructuring that make Iraq different. This international disequilibrium has loosened, not tightened, the grip of American primacy in the world, at the very time Katrina has exposed in microcosm the depth of the American domestic crisis created by the rentier pillaging of the public treasury. These new conditions have generated fractures however temporary between European and American capitals. Fault Lines Western Europe, that still boasts a productive capitalist economy (albeit very vulnerable to US finance capital), is no longer in the grip of its Cold War security dependency on the US, and the attempt by the US to establish a permanent military presence around the Persian Gulf as a future lever against other core nations has led to the Eurasian courtship of Iran as well as the fractious Euro-opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Clinton administration attempted to restore this European sense of military dependency on the US through human rights imperialism in the Balkans, but it didnt take. The Germans exploited the situation for their own purposes, then promptly returned to Eurozone discussions of a regionally autonomous military security strategy. Domestically, both foreign military adventures (in Latin America primarily) and a militarized police war against urban oppressed nationalities in the US were passed off as War on Drugs. That didnt take, in no small part because many Americans like taking drugs especially smoking marijuana, which the federal government idiotically continues to treat as comparable to heroin and rock cocaine. And the libertarianism that was implicit in the rationale of the mythical free-market led many to believe that taking drugs is a victimless crime. Even the verbose arch-conservative William Buckley argues for decriminalization, and currency speculator cum liberal philanthropist George Soros finances whole campaigns for drug decriminalization. Soros is an interesting character in all this, because he is a rentier capitalist par excellence and he is violently opposed to the Bush administration. Not a benign character by any stretch of the imagination, but a financial predator of the first order who made a substantial contribution to the Asian economic meltdown of 1998, Soros is completely devoted to American primacy. The question among ruling circles in the United States is not whether American primacy, but how. Both factions around this debate are aware that a mismatch has occurred between requisite (from their standpoint) economic expansion and post-Cold War political fragmentation. It is only at this juncture that the debate about unilateralism or 151

multilateralism begins to make any real sense. And there is certainly no debate about whether the US can and will employ military force against any and all recalcitrants. It is whether the US has the capacity to go it alone. When John Kerry, who was supported by Soros, expressed support for the occupation of Iraq, but decried the lack of meaningful allied support, he was not equivocating. He meant exactly what he said. He and Soros both recognize the dangers of military overstretch in a period when the world system has been thrown into disequilibrium. The Bush faction really the Cheney-Wolfowitz faction is possessed of a kind of grandiose machismo that says, No guts, no glory. When 9-11 presented itself, this faction, in power due to the political clout of certain business sectors, saw it as a chance to leap over these contradictions and quickly re-establish post-Cold War US primacy on a new foundation. The goal was to reorganize the world for a new period of stability under a new form of the Pax Americana one in which friend and foe alike are obliged to knuckle under to the American diktat. In this sense, the whole project has been an utter failure. This was precisely the fear of the so-called multilateralists that one does not treat a problem caused by disequilibrium by creating more disequilibrium. The destabilization of strategically critical Southwest Asia may have been part of the (real) Bush doctrine certainly the almost mindless provocation of Muslims around the world has seemed more designed to cultivate terrorism than interdict it. Just as provocation of the Soviets actually caused Western Europe to come under the range of Soviet missiles and force European military dependency on the US, the creation of a generalized asymmetric military threat throughout the world might be calculated to recreate that dependency in the absence of the Cold War. But it would be a foolish gamble, militarily at least, because the war in Iraq is proving yet again that protracted wars are not won by states but by insurgents, and that asymmetric warfare is not countered by conventional military strength, but exacerbated by it. Denial and Delusion The other thesis afoot about the Bush war in Iraq is that it is primarily for demonstration effect. It is an example (a demonstration) to the rest of the world about what happens when you fail to heed the wishes of the American state. If so, that too has been not merely a failure but the antithesis of demonstration effect. The Iraq war is now proving to the whole world that the US is incapable of defeating a low-tech, urban resistance. I am one of the troglodytes who still believe that the war is about oil. Right and left alike in several guises want to reject this because they object to the idea of peak oil. The theocratic right, of course, believes in divine intervention and the like; some even believe the Iraq war is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy; and the secular right is obliged by circumstances to repeat the lie that oil is easily available for the next century. Some on the left, on the other hand, are still wedded to the Old Left development paradigm that carries with it an unexamined technological optimism that flies directly in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They have theorized oil solely as a commodity in a universe divorced from physical laws and finite quantity, and entered into a cosmos no less orthodox and abstract than transubstantiation. 152

We have old maps on new terrain. We have rejected the empirical evidence in the name of rejecting empiricism it is accepted by Malthusians, after all. This is tantamount to rejecting the theory of natural selection in biology because of social Darwinism. One thing that is missed in this exercise of denial is the urgency of the future we are actually facing and the scope of the task in front of us. The final stage of imperialism exterminism is coinciding with the final stage of hydrocarbon Homo sapiens. The 21st Century will make the 20th look like an episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood. The first whiff of what this means not in the empiricist argot of the Malthusians, but looking at the social relations of energy crisis (and the multiple socio-economic cascades flowing from it) look at the composition of the Bush administration. Newsweek once noted that Not since the rise of the railroads more than a century ago has a single industry [energy] placed so many foot soldiers at the top of a new administration. There is a wealth of information available about the administrations energy corporation bona fides. What is often not discussed is how heavily stacked the administration is with the proponents of nuclear power. In order to maintain domestic tranquility in the United States, two key things are required: Gasoline for the vehicles, and electricity. We have gone to war to occupy the oil patch and contain China (Look at the new dispositions of US forces, if you dont believe the latter.). The nuclear energy story was the Bush "Energy Transition Advisory Team" (ETAT). It had 48 members, and 14 of them were from nuclear utilities, led by Joe Colvin, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Nevada Representative Shelley Berkley said that the ETAT "reads like the who's who of the nuclear power industry." Thirty-four of the 48 members of the ETAT gave personal campaign contributions to the Bush presidential campaign. One top member who was the biggest single contributor to the Bush campaign was then CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay. Lay was quietly eased aside after the huge energy trading company was exposed as one of the biggest criminal enterprises in history, and one that wiped out the life savings of tens of thousands of people. It is little wonder that nuclear utilities (all of which are also coal utilities), along with the petroleum sector, have done so well under the Bush administration. They run it. "It appears to me," quipped Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, "we have the [energy] industry directing policy." The Bush administration's public relations people have spun out a series of Orwellian narratives implying that the energy needs of American society are synonymous with the financial imperatives of the huge holding companies that now own most public utilities, that nuclear energy is cheaper, safer, and cleaner than all fossil energy (it is none of these), and that emotional rhetoric about homeland security somehow suggests that this is an administration that is showing a genuine material commitment to public safety. On a Saturday night, November 15, 2003, the Bush administration secretly slipped new provisions into their execrable so-called Energy Bill that included a 1.8 cent per kilowatt-hour nuclear production tax credit that could cost taxpayers over $7.5 billion, according to the Nuclear Information Resource Service. Previously existing subsidies and public support of nuclear energy amounts to almost $4 billion a year now, with a cumulative total of $140 billion since the industry began, making nuclear generated electricity the most expensive in existence.

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Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) spokesperson Cindy Folkers sardonically remarked, "Apparently the Bush Administration only upholds free market principles when it isn't inconvenient for their campaign contributors." Cheney is known to be an avid fan of nuclear, and this accounts for the administrations miraculous conversion to faith in the crackpot hydrogen economy. In this energy shell game, the reality behind the legerdemain is that you cant pop those water molecules open into their constituent parts to get the hydrogen without an external energy source read: nuclear. The natural gas theyve been using in their costly research is running low. But the most remarkable aspect of the provisions of the Bush Energy Bill is that they gutted terrorism protection provisions written in the original House-passed bill, and "repeal[ed] a ban on exporting highly enriched uranium to other countries, increasing the chances that nuclear reactors could be hit by terrorists, or that nuclear bomb material could fall into terrorist hands," said Folker. This is not unconscious neglect. It is exterminist acceptance. In fact, as we saw with 9-11, any real attack will be quickly exploited to stampede a cowed Congress into surrendering yet more power to the executive branch. Opportunism and Asymmetry The first step toward understanding what this administration was doing is to connect the energy-security-nexus dots. The stakes are incredibly high on many accounts. There is a powerful connection between putative national security measures and what appears to be a massive assault on environmental, health, safety, and security oversight any time genuine oversight threatens the expansion of already-substantial energy sector profits. So both the autonomy of the state and potentially its legitimacy are at grave risk. We have to understand and prepare to exploit that. This is an administration that has shown an alarming willingness to use national security as a pretext for going after its political enemies and undermining constitutional protections of freedom of assembly and speech, including the scapegoat roundups of thousands of immigrants without due cause. The same people who call these racist roundups an issue of homeland security willingly deploy the pretext of national security to erase corporate accountability and even to criminalize truth-tellers on behalf of private companies. The Bush administration has welcomed every new emergency as an opportunity to advance their agendas those agendas being a contradictory mix of capitalist short-term (business cycle cool money and speculative hot money) interests and grand(iose), neocon, unilateral long range strategy objectives. Note that after Katrina, Bush Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Alphonso Jackson (one of Bushs Uncle Tom Squad), actually told the Houston Chronicle that New Orleans would be rebuilt whiter, reducing the pre-Katrina 65% Black population to around 35%. Jackson himself told Mayor Ray Nagin not to rebuild the largely Black 9th Ward a working class Black neighborhood where most of the homes were owned, not rented (and therefore affordable). These people not-fully-citizens from the Black Nation are to be dispersed into 40 states and housed in Bushvilles, the new name for FEMA trailer parks. Meanwhile, more affluent and whiter neighborhoods like Lakeview, that are just as flood-prone as the 9th Ward, are already being reviewed for reconstruction. Jackson, by the way, was a developer before he was appointed to HUD. 154

Nagin himself now appears to be lining up with the developers. Thats where the money is. This is just a small example of Bush regime emergency opportunism. And these mass displacements are emblematic of negligent-exterminism. Emergencies work for the Bush administration. At least they have so far. But they may be inching further and further out onto a legitimacy overhang. The response to Katrina was not only morally reprehensible; it exposed the reorganized Department of Homeland Security as an ineffectual cesspool of patronage and incompetence. This mirrors exactly the crisis in Iraq. Just as the Department of Homeland Security has proven incapable of the protection of citizens (a key base of state legitimacy), the US military is mired in yet another un-winnable quagmire (ability to wage successful war is another base of legitimacy). Responding to Crisis NEW ORLEANS Oct 5, 2005 (AP) His city in financial ruin from Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin is slashing about half the city's work force, a move he said caused him "great sadness." Nagin said Tuesday he would lay off as many as 3,000 employees because he had been unable to find the money to keep the workers on the payroll. The layoffs are "pretty permanent," Nagin said, and the city will work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to notify municipal employees who fled the city after the hurricane struck more than a month ago. "I wish I didn't have to do this. I wish we had the money, the resources to keep these people," Nagin said. "The problem we have is we have no revenue streams." He said only nonessential workers will be laid off and that no firefighters or police will be among those let go. The layoffs, which will take place over the next two weeks, will shave about $5 million to $8 million from the city's monthly payroll of $20 million. We talked to local banks and other financial institutions and we are just not able to put together the financing necessary to continue to maintain City Hall's staffing at its current levels," the mayor said Robert Warner, 51, of New Orleans said he and others have struggled to get private housing set up through FEMA. "We've been mired in the bureaucratic red tape since Day One," he said. In the larger scheme of things, we are living in an era where scarcity the bugaboo of past reactionaries and Malthusians is being made real. just like the threat of terrorism is being made real by the very system that claims it as an enemy. Fisheries depleted, steel shortages, the loss of forests and arable lands, water famine these are all realities. In a hypothetical world, where we could snap our fingers and suddenly impose draconian conservation measures on the core nations, it would still 155

require three additional earths to supply the resources necessary to develop the entire planet to the technological level of the core. Many points of no return have already been passed. Only a bolder way can rescue us from the older way. We dont see the essence of these crises easily, because crises do not lay themselves open to laboratory analysis. They are mediated socially, and so we see the social character masks of crisis self-referential ruling class impunity, hubris, and corruption; and these mere transient manifestations serve to simultaneously expose the ruling class social pathologies a good thing and disorient the rest of us with the belief that we are witnessing simple moral failures a problem. Ecocide, the result of modernism in its capitalist etiology and in its former guise as barracks socialism has become its opposite. Effect has now become causative, and the breakdown of the very geologic and biospheric architecture that forms the material basis of life on the planet has spawned a global war of incremental extermination for the key material force multiplier of human work within modernism fossil energy and a host of other strategic resources. But even this is symptomatic. The struggle for remaining extractable oil on the planet is part and parcel of a deeper ruling project that recognizes clearly what the future holds, and intends to wipe out competitive demand. The seagull ethic. Exterminism. Mark Jones wrote two days after the World Trade Center attacks, September 13, 2001: Crises, seemingly, have to be scaled to lie within some very starklydemarcated existential boundary which maps straight onto to the envelope of everyday life and mass consciousness. Otherwise we are paralysed into inaction. This is an ominous indicator about the likely fate of Homo sapiens. And the empirical evidence for pessimism is there in the historical record of previous, now disappeared, civilisations. Civilisations which do not develop political and social institutions capable of pushing out the envelope, capable that is of anticipating and preempting or resolving major step-changes (catastrophic, systemic crisis) are routinely destroyed. The growth of complexity (implying cultural richness, higher technology, more collective power of symbolic reasoning etc) does not necessarily help. In the absence of an equivalent institutional development, complexity, with its attendant entropic burden, seems only to accelerate crisis when it begins and then to deepen the post-crisis collapse. Great civilisations do not morph into lesser ones, but into totally devastated landscapes peopled by bands of roaming scavengers. This cyclical pattern of civilisational growth followed by abrupt collapse, of terminal crisis followed by periods of darkness lasting sometimes for centuries, is very evident in the historical record. Honest historians can confront us with stark news. Fail to develop political and social institutions; sleepwalk into the abyss. What we see in days and weeks and months and years are mere episodes in the larger epoch and now we are seeing the crisis of the metropolitan left, lost with all its outdated maps, as a political and leadership vacuum in a period when people are witnessing the coincident breakup of modernism and capitalism. In the absence of a left 156

with clarity and a fighting spirit, the masses are each day more susceptible to retreat; and a retreat from modernism instead of a fight through to the other side of it leads people back to mythical pasts, to atavism and self-absorbed mysticism, and to fascist reaction. Instead of leadership, the metropolitan left lost with its archaic maps spins out programs. Hal Draper wrote all the way back in 1971 about left sect construction (and selfmarginalization): The sect establishes itself on a HIGH level (far above that of the working class) and on a thin base, which is ideologically selective (usually necessarily outside working class). Its working-class character is claimed on the basis of its aspiration and orientation, not its composition or its life. It then sets out to haul the working class up to its level, or calls on the working class to climb up the grade. From behind its organizational walls, it sends out scouting parties to contact the working class, and missionaries to convert two here and three there. It sees itself becoming, one day, a mass revolutionary party by a process of accretion; or by eventual unity with two or three other sects; or perhaps by some process of entry. Marx, on the other, saw the vanguard elements as avoiding above all the creation of organizational walls between themselves and the class-inmotion. The task was not to lift up two workers here and three there to the level of the Full Program (let alone two students here and three intellectuals there!) but to go after the levers that could get the class, or sections or the class, moving as a mass onto higher levels of action and politics. The sect mentality sees its sanctification only in its Full Program, that is, in what separates it from the working class. If, god forbid, some slogan it puts forth bids fair to become to popular, it gets scared. Something must be the matter! We must have capitulated to somebody. (This is not a caricature: it is drawn from life.) Marx's approach was exactly the opposite. The job of the vanguard was to work out slogans that would be popular in the given state of the class struggle, in the sense of being able to get broadest possible masses of workers moving. That means: moving on an issue, in a direction, in a way that would bring them into conflict with the capitalist class and its state, and the agents of capitalists and state, including the labor lieutenants of capitalism (its own leaders). The sect is a miniaturized version of the revolutionary party-to-be, a small mass party, a microscopic edition or model of the mass party that does not yet exist. Rather, it thinks of itself this way, or tries to be such a miniature. The strongest resistance is now coming from the world systems non-citizens, and that is precisely why any assessment of the revolutionary potential of any section of metropolitan society needs to assess the degree of citizenship they perceive themselves to have or not. Venezuelas revolution right now involves awarding meaningful citizenship to the disenfranchised. First the Constitution was rewritten to transfer citizen-power to the masses from the ruling class. Then the basis of every literacy program was teaching the people how to read and understand that new Constitution. In Iraq, where the US is 157

facing its deepest crisis, the very state, which creates the basis for citizenship, has been destroyed and replaced with an irascible and opportunistic rump government that has neither autonomy nor legitimacy. The tactical strength of the resistance and its strategic weakness is its deracination, its statelessness. In Bolivia, the source of resistance is the indigenous population long frozen out of political power by the racist elites. What is working is beyond the envelope. Political uprootedness and social embeddedness. In Venezuela, it is establishing citizenship outside the world system paradigm. Social embeddedness in Cuba, combined with manageable scale and the forced march toward sustainability, mobilizing full citizenship, has given that nation the means to survive. In Bolivia, the status of non-citizenship left indigenous forces with nothing to lose by using the weapons of general strike and blockade of the cities the nerve centers of world system integration. Peasants in Nepal, Haiti, and the Philippines outsiders. External to the system. The victims of Katrina especially the Black victims, whose refusal to buy the explicit White nationalism of the Republican Party is a reflection of lack of citizenship now scattered in a Diaspora within a Diaspora are on the brink of a struggle to reclaim their homes from the ruling class looters. This is a struggle against slow extermination, and if the left and other progressives want to face up to the challenge of exterminism, then there is the front line this is where we renounce our semi- citizenship and begin to re-map the way to the future, using the weapons of the masses general strike, urban blockade, secession. Build the consciousness for these struggles, instead of managed elections, and we will push out the envelope. The crisis of legitimacy is latent right now. It will become real when the storm surge hits the white suburbs. That is coming. But the left cannot be complacent, because without intervention the reaction to that crisis will be deeply. reaction-ARY. Now is the time to (1) seriously re-found a domestic politics of resistance, (2) base the leadership core that resistance in populations who are not full citizens in the United States, and (3) focus that resistance in the Sunbelt. This in no way suggests that everyone drop everything and run off to Louisiana to join Black rebel armies. The most critical initial tasks include winning over as large a section of white America as possible to a non-reactionary understanding of the period, supporting and strengthening the struggle against the US wars in Southwest Asia, and supporting and strengthening the institutions, intellectuals, and authentic politicalcommunity leaders from the internal colonies of the United States. Out of the very broad antiwar movement, which is now representative of the views of the US majority, two things need to emerge. First, the development of political independence from the Democratic Party. This timid, moribund formation is the graveyard of resistance politics, and the sooner it dies the better. This requires an aggressive effort to develop and teach resistance politics that is not primarily electoral-legislative, but more and more openly disruptive. This does not mean electoral abstentionism, the moralizing and idealistic (and white privileged) province of the ultra-left. It means building the alternatives at the grassroots, beginning with economic independence, that makes the break possible. Second, a broad political alternative must be developed to give an independent alternative an organizational assertion. That will not be yet another leftist sect. My most tentative suggestion is that of a red, black, and green alliance and not just because of my deep sympathy for Black nationalism. There are hundreds of thousands 158

of socialists (red) often unaffiliated with any sect, and hundreds of thousands of politically active African Americans (black) who feel like taking a bath every time they are forced yet again to vote for a spineless white Democrat who will invariably forget them in the second week of November. There are hundreds of thousands of people across the spectrum who understand the depth of the environmental crisis we have been driven into, and who are just as deeply skeptical about green-capitalism schemes continually trotted out by multimillion dollar enviro non-profits like the Sierra Club. This kind of alliance must also be willing to struggle against the legacy of patriarchy from right and left, and ensure that more than half of all leadership positions in every project and formation are authentically representative women. The key to white activists supporting this critical effort is twofold. Accept Black leadership, and share resources. The political organizing of such an alliance should be as far as possible locallyrooted, and committed to building the alternative institutions we will need as the state continues to careen into the cul-de-sac of de-legitimacy. In specific cases, like New Orleans, there must be national efforts to fight not just for immediate relief, but to fight the imperatives of exterminism displacement and dispersion. The fight for New Orleans has to start with the repatriation of every willing resident to the 9th Ward, but it cannot end until the toxins are cleaned up, the schools are funded and effective, and the residents themselves are organized to fight for their own self-determination.

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India Takes the Stage (Originally published at From the Wilderness, 2006) Nuclear India In war every truth has to have an escort of lies. -Winston Churchill New Delhi is now being seduced by Washington into an nuclear agreement to enmesh India into US spider's web , which would adversely affect the security of a billion plus Indians . -K Gajendra Singh In June 2006, the US Congress was embroiled in the solemn business of debating whether they should protect the American flag from the Satanic legions wanting to set it afire. While the American public was riveted by this momentous rhetorical contest, the United States House of Representatives International Relations Committee quietly blessed a draft of the United States and India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act (USINCP). The flagburning debate was grist for hundreds of thousands of letters to the editors in American newspapers. Hardly a peep was heard about a bill that will create multiple bifurcations in world history and carries with it the potentials for anything from the collapse of American global hegemony to nuclear war. Who in middle America -- wherever that is -- could care less about India. It may be the second most populous nation on Earth, but why should that matter as we continue the consumer party on the tapering ledge of personal debt and ignore the dark clouds of deflation gathering on that far horizon? People who are raggedy and brown are on the other side of our imaginary wall. The USINCP is, in fact, the latest US campaign in the global Energy War. Once ratified, it will also drive the last nail in the coffin of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). This is one of many reasons the wall is, indeed, imaginary. In exploring the social, cultural, and political relations of the Energy War, it would be irresponsible to relegate the second most populous nation -- one day to be the most populous nation -- in the world to a footnote. In light of the profound complexity and import of the USINCP and its social, historical, and ecological context, bypassing India -as opposed to settling our final critical gaze here -- would constitute a stunning historical oversight. India is both a nation and a sub-continent. It is the 7th largest nation in the world geographically, with 1.1 billion people. It borders Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Burma. It has 28 states and seven Union Territories, and many have remarked that these subdivisions are as culturally diverse as the nations of Europe. Over thirty languages are routinely spoken there, Hindu most commonly (by around 350 million) with English serving as a lingua franca for over 200 million. The national-cultural character of India, then, has always been problematic, and the sense of national identity was forged as distinctly political in the struggle for independence against the British after World War II. The struggle over the meaning of 160

Indian nationality continues to this day, even as the rest of the world perceives India to be the worlds largest stable democracy. Meeting the challenges to that stability has always been arduous, but the confluence of ecological and political pressures in India today, and the sudden attentions of the United States, Russia, and China as the latter two explore the possibility of forming a bloc against the former, have brought India centerstage in what may be the most dangerous conjuncture in human history. Given the territorial logic of power in the contest between the United States and China -- which in many senses defines the Energy War -- Indias spatial position between China and the petroleum states of Southwest Asia, as well as its surfeit of warm water ports, made Indias reluctant participation in the new Great Game inevitable. David Harvey, who coined the term territorial logic of power, has noted that the economic, cultural, political, and eco- logics of power often fail to correspond to this territorial logic. The disastrous war against Iraq is a perfect example of these logical disjunctions. Herein also lay many of the dilemmas for the various power brokers who have recently turned their eyes to India. The current situation is more volatile, in part, because of the delusional pretensions of much of the Indian dominant class. They play incessantly at India being a great power -- a notion that has led to the muscular Indian-male chauvinism that identifies itself with the successful test of a nuclear weapon in 1998. Vandana Shiva wrote in April 2006: When the nuclear tests were carried out by India in Pokhran on May 11, 1998, the tests were described as explosions of self-esteem and megatonnes of prestige. The major media dubbed the bomb a Hindu bomb. By May 30, Pakistan had announced six nuclear tests at Chagai. This new bomb was deemed an Islamic bomb by the same media. This identical nuclear threat could not be interpreted as a defense of cultural difference. The masculine, militaristic minds on both sides of the border that divided our people half a century ago saw the bomb as a symbol of sectarian power. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) announced that with the nuclear tests, India had finally demonstrated its manhood. This masculine technological-military fetish, that sees The Bomb as a world stage credential, maps directly onto the development paradigm -- embraced in different guises from the right to the left of the political spectrum in India -- embodied in both the Green Revolution and the current attempt to industrialize India. Both the Green Revolution and industrialization have been -- for most of India -unmitigated social catastrophes. This fact has had little impact on the faith in both by both elites and the most influential of the communist parties. The latter have, however, been far more nuanced than the right in India about how they relate to questions raised by The Bomb. While the USINCP purports to be an agreement related to electrical generation with nuclear power, it is centrally and absolutely about nuclear weapons every bit as much as it is about the Energy War and he epic political contest between China and the United States. And for all the Indian machismo associated with The Bomb, the circumstance of India right now on the world stage is more analogous to that of the archetypical coy pre161

courtesan alternating her attention between two suitors. And just as surely as the power of the sought-after mistress conceals her fundamental lack of real social power, so Indias positioning in this contest belies the very notion of Great Nation-hood that has accompanied the delusion created by The Bomb. The Game Much of the chatter about India as an emerging Great Power is not associated with The Bomb, but with above-average economic growth rates and an empiricist (and therefore faulty) comparison with high growth rates in neighboring China. In December 2002, Aspects of Indias Economy published a special issue on India and the Iraq War, in which it editorialized: Only the most naive would buy the ideaadvanced in the speeches of Indian and US leadersthat the reason for the USs newfound interest is Indias increased importance as a world power. Indias economy is less than one-twentieth the size of the USs, and its entire Gross Domestic Product is just about the size of the US trade deficit. Its official military budget is $13 billion or so, compared to the USs $379 billion. The object of recent moves by the US is not Indo-US partnership, but advancing US interests, using India as a strategic pawn. In the words of US ambassador Robert Blackwill, President Bush vigorously pursues strategic relations with India because a powerful India will advance American democratic values [sic] and vital US national interests in the decade ahead. The latter quote was from US Ambassador (to India) Robert Blackwill on November 27th that same year. Immediately following September 11, 2001, Blackwill made remarks that were interpreted by the New York Times and the Washington Post thus: The tenor and substance of the ambassadors remarks signaled a calm acceptance of Indias nuclear status. (US Envoy Extols India, Accepting Its Atom Status, NYT, 7/9/01) There is new thinking about nuclear doctrine, and India, at the White House. Bush intends to end the sanctions in a matter of months, according to aides, and wants a new strategic relationship with India. (Rethinking Asia in Indias Favor, Jim Hoagland, WP, 1/7/01) This strategic partnership is, of course, designed to advance the Wolfowitz doctrine of containing China to prevent any economic, political, or military challenge to US power. One needs merely note the frenetic activity of the Bush-Rice state Department in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Nepal, and Indonesia, then refer to a map, to confirm the center of the State Departments interest. The difficulties in this plot arising from the radical military miscalculation of the US in Iraq are hard to overestimate. In exercising the Bush Doctrine of preemption, it seems,

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the Bush administration has preempted itself. While the US has found itself tied down in the Lilliput of Iraq (and ever more Afghanistan), China has been advancing. The United States is no longer Chinas dominant trading partner. The European Union is. And Euroland capitalists have now become so dependent on Chinese investments and markets that they recently repealed the EU weapons technology embargo against China, while the US State Department sputtered helplessly behind the scenes. China is now Japans biggest trading partner. It is telling that Tom Donnelly, writing this year for Armed Forces Journal, is sounding the alarm that China is meddling in both Africa and Latin America (as id American involvement in these regions can be otherwise characterized). Massive and growing US debt to China, increasing at a rate of around $13 billion a month, and which finances American military profligacy, is combined with substantial US capitalist investment in Chinese enterprise. This creates a situation of dependency and vulnerability for the US that the Financial Times decried on July 26, 2005, as A Test of American Independence (Lael Brainerd & Michael OHanlon). The Chinese show a greater capacity than the linear neo-cons to understand the diverse logics of power. Meanwhile, China now imports almost 10 percent of the worlds crude oil, around a third of the globes coal, iron ore, and rolled steel, a quarter of its aluminum, and over 40 percent of its concrete. It is this unsustainable trajectory that bodes ill for both China and India -- growing dependence on finite supplies of raw materials, particularly energy -- though the continued control over the economic organs of society in China is still Chinese, while in India, the US exercises nearly complete economic hegemony. The short, medium, and long-term secular trends associated with world energy peaks -- especially oil over the next three decades -- will inevitably be marked by turbulent international relations, given the exacerbation of rivalries for remaining supplies. In the short term, every Asian country has to be concerned with US machinations, the US military capacity most importantly. The oversea guarantor for Southwest Asian energy supply transit is still the US Navy; and US military unilateralism, while stalled in Iraq, remains a vital concern for all actors. A stand-down of rivalries between India and China, and India and Pakistan, would substantially weaken the US position in the region by paving the way for higher levels of cooperation in the overland transit of oil, and in the formation -- already in the making -of an Asian trading and security bloc that can wean itself from the US-directed and International Monetary Fund administered neo-liberal consensus. In both India and Pakistan, and to a far lesser degree China (where the state has maintained control of financial organs, and the Chinese Communist Party has maintained control over the state), there are highly influential, native, comprador bourgeoisies that thrive as national intermediaries within this system. So the question in the near term, looking at political logics within both Pakistan and India, is which sectors of society will identify their interests with the US and which with the emerging Asian Bloc? The resource, or eco-, logics in the region and in India especially, are not holding still until these political questions are answered. On the contrary, Indian economic growth, so vaunted by the compradors and the Indian middle class, has exacerbated social divisions, thrown up an obscurantist Hindu-nationalist political movement (Hindutva), and led to an expanding ecological crisis with profound economic consequences. 163

Energy, Agriculture, and Politics India was founded as an agricultural colony, and -- with only a short respite from this status in the wake of its independence struggle -- has remained one, all the Panglossian blather about growth notwithstanding. Energy, which both drives this capital accumulation and accelerates the environmental crisis, recently had a price spike that led to massive middle class protests. Physicist and activist, Vandana Shiva, author of Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997) and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000), asks in End of Cheap Oil, The Global Energy Crisis and Climate Change (Znet, June 26, 2006): Why are we as a country tying our future to a resource that must shrink and become more costly? As we build more superhighways and mega cities, destroying the decentralized fabric of our socio-economic organization, we need to ask how long will this last? While the India-US nuclear deal has been framed in terms of sustainable and green energy (neither of which is even remotely true), Indian officials can hardly resist the temptation to mobilize Hindutva A-bomb-masculinity when they discuss the deal. When Lalit Mansingh, Indian Ambassador to the United States spoke in March of the deal, he said, The Indo-US nuclear deal is a significant achievement. Not only does it offer the most promising solution for India's looming energy crisis, it implicitly recognizes India as a nuclear weapon state, thereby ending their decades of nuclear isolation and technology denial. (italics added) Indias real needs, on its present development path, are petroleum and natural gas, not to lift up the fortunes of the Dalit (lower and under-classes), but to further secure the political loyalty of the Indian middle class, which is demanding a lifestyle similar to its Western counterparts. The majority of the Indian population still lives in the countryside, where once upon a time, there was that kind of poverty that at least has access to adequate nutrition and water to sustain the body metabolisms of the people who lived there. The combination of the so-called Green Revolution and neoliberalism has utterly destroyed the most helpful aspects of that localized economy and folded its most backward aspects (particularly its misogynistic practices) into a new politics of Hindutva reaction. Neoliberalism fit itself atop the outcomes of the Green Revolution quite seamlessly, and not surprisingly. (I will return to neoliberalism further along.) Both are processes, at the end of the day, of plunder masquerading as progress. The Green Revolution, so-called, was actually the introduction by the Western metropoles of resource intensive, monocrop agriculture, using specially-developed highyield (and patented) seeds to dramatically increase the food output per hectare of land in under-developed countries. India was heavily targeted, and willingly so, by political actors whod accepted the development paradigm which included industrialization and its consequent urbanization. Developmentalism on the left and right in India led to the embrace of the Green Revolution, as it did in most newly independent nations after the collapse of European colonialism during World War II. This was not solely driven by the short-sighted 164

technological optimism of the period. There were urgent international pressures on newly independent nations like India. Robert Biel, in The New Imperialism, Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000), wrote: For both military and economic reasons the window of opportunity for nations in the South was quite small; they had to prevent themselves from being invaded and at the same time force the pace of development, or otherwise the benefits of the primitive accumulation resulting from the liquidation of traditional society would be creamed off by foreign exploiters Much of the latecomer, nationalistic strategy revolves around the idea that for the South capitalist development cannot proceed at the natural pace, which it would develop in the absence of international factors. If they could industrialize within a time warp, domestic entrepreneurs would expropriate traditional society at their own pace and develop a level of technology appropriate to a particular stage. (P. 35) This was the perfect blend of andro-centric, conquest-of-nature applied science, Western Orientalism, comprador avarice, and Comintern developmentalism. The result has been calamitous. In 2004, the World Bank, in furtherance of the Green Revolution, started pressuring India to pass The Seed Act, which would prohibit Indian farmers from using their own, locally-grown seed. Both agribusiness and the big, labor-intensive industries recognize a threat to accumulation in locally-grown food and in food security off the laborcapital grid. The Green Revolution was based not on the intensification of natures processes, but on the intensification of credit and purchased inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was based not on self-reliance, but dependence. It was based not on diversity but uniformity. Advisors and experts came from America to shift India's agricultural research and agricultural policy from an indigenous and ecological model to an exogenous, and high input one, finding, of course, partners in sections of the elite, because the new model suited their political priorities and interests. There were three groups of international agencies involved in transferring the American model of agriculture to India - the private American Foundations, the American Government and the World Bank. (Vandana Shiva, Terrorism, Agriculture, and US-India Cooperation, Znet, August 10, 2005) The imported Green Revolution seeds are, unlike locally used seed, neither pestresistant nor drought-resistant. Consequently, they required extremely high inputs of petroleum-dependent fertilizers, pesticides, and water. A lot of water. Indian aquifers have been drawn down to crisis-levels in only a few decades. Reducing aquifers not only destroys the water supply, it concentrates contaminants. The 165

industrial agricultural runoff pollutes surface waters, and the hyper-irrigation has led to massive soil salinization (sterilization). Much of the interstate conflict along the IndianPakistani border is associated with uses of the Indus River that flows through both countries, and which is needed for industrialized agriculture. Combined with the massive water demand of expanding urban industry and the migration of dispossessed rural populations into cities, to where more water must then be diverted, there is a generalized crisis of water throughout India. In India, water politics is very serious politics. This process of revolution began in the 1960s. When the results turned out to be horrific, the same institution that put pressure on India to adopt these catastrophic measures, the World Bank, offered its own solution to the water crisis. Privatization. Neoliberalism in India We of the river bank, never go to work as wage labourers The forest is our moneylender and banker. From its teak and bamboo, we built our houses. From its riches we are able to make our baskets and cots, ploughs and hoes. From its trees, leaves, herbs and roots, we get our medicines. Our cattle and goats, which are our wealth, graze here freely as they have always done. For all these, we would have to pay money in Gujarat. -Bava Maharia Tonk is a town in Rajasthan state. It is the site of the Bisalpur dam. On June 13, 2005, during a farmers protest, four farmers and a pregnant woman were killed when the police from the BJP-led local government opened fire. The 1989 World Bank development scheme that led to the construction of the dam (to provide for monocrop agricultural irrigation) had displaced over 70,000 rural dwellers like Bava Maharia. One of the promises to those displaced who managed to remain in the area, albeit starting over, was that they would have access to the water contained within the dam. The protests came when water was diverted from local villages to supply increasing demand in the city of Jaipur. (an Asian Development Bank [ADB] scheme, supported by the state BJP government). For thousands of years, and until the mid-1980s, most of Delhis water needs were provided by the river on which Delhi was built -- the Yamuna River. Delhi didnt run out of that water. Development poisoned it. Development of high pollution industry took priority over things like water treatment and local sanitation systems that would serve the general population, and the Yamuna was converted into a toxic, bio-hazardous broth. In Water Privatisation and Water Wars, Vandana Shiva describes a plan to divert water from the Ganga River (635 million liters a day) to Delhi, rather than fix the Yamuna River. That diversion would deliver the water to a private company, Ondeo Degrement, that would then benefit from increased water fees (also a demand of the World Bank). The Congress Party in Delhi is determined to create another Tonk in Muradnagar, with its demand to divert 635 million litres of Ganga

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water per day to the Sonia Vihar Plant, which has been privatized to Ondeo Degrement a subsidiary of Suez. The real politics of water is not Congress vs BJP. It is World Bank/ADB and other aid agencies creating water markets for global water MNCs [multinational corporations] while robbing the Indian people both hydrologically and financially. [Dr. Shiva goes on to explain the fee structure (tariffs):] Delhi is also demanding 180 million litres per day to be diverted from Punjab's Dhakra Dam. Water will also be diverted to Delhi from the Renuka dam on Giri River (1250 million cubic litres per day) and Keshau Dam on Tons River (610 million cubic litres per day) from distant Himachal in the Himalayas.On December 1, 2004 water tariffs were increased in Delhi. While the government stated this was necessary for recovering costs of operation and maintenance, the tariff increase is ten times more than what is needed to run Delhi's water supply. The increase is to lay the ground for the privatization of Delhi's water, and ensure super profits for the private operators. Increasing tariffs before pivatisation is part of World Bank's "tool kit". It is part of a stepwise approach to "secure at least some private sector involvement in risky countries". Before full privatization, the "privatepublic partnership" is to increase tariffs through a public utility, so that increased tariffs can support a commercial operation (i.e guarantee profit margins). Service and management contracts can be introduced while the government increases the tariff. Privatization, of course, is part of the neo-liberal orthodoxy. While neoliberalism purports to favor the free market theory espoused by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, its practice has been no more free than the history of markets during capitalist development in other eras. The disconnect for many in understanding neoliberalism is this chasm between its ideology and practice. While espousing the values of freedom and choice (always predicated, of course, on the sanctity of private property), its practice has been about what David Harvey calls accumulation through dispossession, i.e., the plunder of communal systems, local institutions, and the commons. Water supplies are a key example of commons. While the ideology of neoliberalism has trumpeted internationalism and economic interconnection as the key to preventing a replay of the great armed conflicts of the 20th Century, its practice has supported the collaborative plunder of the underdeveloped nations by the over-developed metropoles, with general acceptance of the United States playing the role of arbiter and umpire -- a kind of first among equals. It has been characterized by a carrot and stick approach that rewards local national elites (a comprador bourgeoisie) in underdeveloped countries for facilitating metropolitan access to the target nations capital markets through debt-leverage (IMF loans), and raiding the target nations assets when debtor-conditions (called structural adjustment) wreck local enterprises. Most important is what neoliberalism does in the realm of agriculture. 167

Any prevailing system of localized agriculture, especially that which provides subsistence for the rural poor, sees its land holdings seized through various stratagems (even from peasant landlords -- themselves existing parasitically off the tenants -- if they fail to support large-scale enclosures), for conversion to industrially-dependent, high-yield monocropping under the control of large corporations. This becomes necessary to transform the target nations agriculture into an export-led enterprise to find dollars in foreign markets in order to service dollar-denominated external debt. This system has devastated Indias kisans (farmers). During the 2004 election, when the Hindutva Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) launched its India Shining campaign -- designed by the giant Grey Global Group PR firm -- Indian farmers tarred their billboards with the words, We too exist! The campaign featured images of the Indian middle class, smiling and optimistic under the rule of the right-wing Bomb-men. While roughly a quarter billion Indians have flourished -- albeit in very insecure ways -- as part of this middle class, the poorest in India, particularly farmers, have been devastated. The incorporation of the feudal caste system into the culture of Indian modernization has proven effective at rendering the Dalit invisible to this class of managers, public servants, and technocrats. Two thirds of India still lives in the countryside. Aseem Shrivastava, writing in July 2004, noted acerbically: When you contemplate the catastrophe that has been brought upon the Indian countryside by the agricultural policies of the BJP government, it is in fact surprising that the electoral verdict was not even more severe. As the journalist P. Sainath has noted, only a deluded mass media obsessed with consumerist fantasies could fail to notice the banal realities of the Indian countryside. While city journalists fastened their attention on the fashion parades and the beauty contests, droughts ravaged the villages, growing millions went hungry and across India thousands of farmers drank pesticides and committed suicide in order to draw the attention of the government to their plight in the wake of agricultural policies influenced heavily by a desire to please the World Trade Organization (WTO). The story of Indian (and Pakistani) farmer suicides is horrendous. The mechanisms for dispossessing farmers were a combination of withdrawn subsidies, high-interest debts, and unrecompensed crop failures. Two thirds of Indias farmers are in serious debt. Banks have refused loans to farmers for seven years as part of structural adjustment, and left farmers to be preyed upon by usurious comprador loan-sharks. Rural landlessness has jumped from 35% to 45% in the last decade. Rural incomes, always precarious, have dropped by a third. Climate change is accelerating droughts and floods, while monocropping has brought insect plagues. Official estimates of the number of suicides -which are political suicides, the reason farmers commit suicide with pesticides -- are considered to be gross undercounts. NGOs estimate there have been at least 40,000 such suicides since 1998. Indian analysts like Hari P. Sharma put the number nearer 100,000. The rejection of ethnic-nationalist (many simply call them Hindu-fascist) BJP in 2004, and the re-election of the Congress Party, was anything but an endorsement of the Congress party, that enjoys a status of administrative entrechment and patronage

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comparable to that enjoyed for many years by the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Harvey describes neoliberalism as a project to restore lost power to the dominant class. Inroads made in the industrial metropoles by social movements during the period of Keynesianism created a dangerous conjuncture for the ruling class during the turbulent 60s and 70s, which was systematically reversed during the development of the neoliberal project, epitomized by leaders such as Agosto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and even Deng Xioaping. I would argue that this is accurate to a degree, but that it was the failure of Keynesianism to permanently overcome the crisis tendencies within capitalism itself, as well as the exponential decline of per capita resources and its attendant ecological crisis. Implementation of neoliberalism is, however, generally opportunistic. When a crisis occurs, the IMF moves in and imposes the structural adjustment programs (SAPs). In 1990, the government of PresidentVail Singh dissolved Parliament after an arms trade scandal implicated Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Ghandi -- unlike his mother Indira, an earlier Prime Minister -- was moving in a neoliberal direction, and sought to appeal the United States. In that vein, he gave Indian support to Sri Lanka in their counter-guerrilla campaign against the Tamil separatists of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers). On May 21, 1991, while he was campaigning for Congress Party candidates in Sriperumbudur, Rajiv Ghandi was killed a 17-year-old Tamil guerrilla, named Thenmuli Rajaratnam (guerrilla name, Dhanu). She attended the campaign rally with a very sophisticated bomb concealed under her dress, and detonated it after garlanding Ghandi then bowing before him, killing herself, Ghandi, and 16 others. The story has it that Dhanu had been raped by Indian soldiers who participated in operations with the Sri Lankan government. The assassination -- given that his mother, Indira, was also assassinated, and that India was a political cauldron at the time -- created a blizzard of conspiracy theories and India became a tinderbox. This went largely unnoticed by the American public, still transfixed in its own triumphal post-war afterglow in the wake of the destruction of Iraq as a modern state. The assassination (and its subsequent fiscal crisis) did not go unnoticed, however, by the masters of finance capital on Wall Street or by the officials of the International Monetary Fund. To assist them were Indian compradors aplenty, who had been champing at the bit to accelerate Indias liberalization. The Gulf War had already created an energy price spike that further agitated Indians, particularly those who had ascended -- however tentatively -- to the middle class (no more than 15% of the population, and rich by Indian standards an elite calling itself middle class). During the 1980s, under Rajiv Ghandi, India had run up a major current account deficit feeding the consumer appetite of this sector. The Rupee was overvalued already, and tax breaks to the nouveau riche were being compensated by borrowing from non-resident Indians. External debt nearly trebled over the decade, from $23.8 billion to $62.3 billion, with $6 billion needing to be immediately rolled over, while the debt service burden rose from 15 to 30 per cent of export earnings and government interest payments from 10 to 19 per cent of total expenditure. (Achin Vanaik, The New Indian Right, New Left Review, June, 2001) 169

Enter the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In December 1991, India signed up for an IMF bailout loan and a World Bank Structural Adjustment Loan. Together, they were barely enough to cover Indias debt service; but the Indian economy was now exposed for structural adjustment. Neoliberalism had arrived. Rise of the Indian Right While David Harvey has emphasized motive in neoliberalism, the restoration of ruling class power and accumulation through dispossession, Peter Gowan has emphasized method. In The Global Gamble, he explains that the attack on Keynesian economics was not simply an attack on metropolitan working class gains and the imposition of debt peonage on the under-developed South. It also entailed the abolition of Keynesian repression on the financial pole of global capital -- faulted by Keynesians, accurately to a large extent, for the speculative swelter that catalyzed the Great Depression. The liberation of finance capital, in conjunction with globalization, changed the character of both finance capital and imperialism as defined by Hilferding and Lenin. They were not national, but international. They were not a Darwinian struggle between metropolitan capitals, but a collaborative venture between them to exploit the South. And they were not the merger of banks with industrial capital, but an international, technologically networked lava flow of hot money that is, purely speculative investment. This gave neoliberalism its grotesquely parasitic character. It also established the systems general immunity to political intervention by any except the one dominant state. Global hot money, notes Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik restricts the scope for demand management by the nation-state, undermining Keynesianism directly. Financial interests within any country, as Keynes and Kalecki argued, tend to be hostile to demand management; when finance is international, this hostility acquires a spontaneous effectiveness. Any effort by the state to expand economic activity makes speculators apprehensive about inflation, exchange rate depreciation and, more generally, of political radicalism and finance flows out of the country; this precipitates actual depreciation and inflation, forcing the state to curtail activity so that speculators feel comfortable. State intervention presupposes a "control area" of the state, over which its writ can run; globalization of finance tends to undermine this control area. If, from Mitterrand to Schrder, a host of left-wing governments in the advanced capitalist countries (elected on the promise that they would increase employment) have failed to do so, the reason lies in this objective constraint on state intervention rather than, necessarily, in bad faith or betrayal. It also explains the decline of all ideologies of social change, from social democracy to Keynesianism to third world nationalism, even to old communism (which lost its immunity to capital flights): since all of them see the nation-state as the agency of intervention, globalization of finance,

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by restricting the state's capacity to intervene, has undermined their coherence. What Harvey does emphasize in his description of modern imperialism is that the non-dominant states are subordinate to finance capital, but that finance capital is still secured by the state, and specifically by military power. Accumulation by dispossession is not possible without it. Capitalist imperialism, note Leo Panitch and Sam Ginden (Global Capitalism and American Empire, free online as this is written), needs to be understood through an extension of the theory of the capitalist state, rather than derived directly from the theory of economic stages or crises. Finance capital is not independent any more than a cheap loan shark is. It requires muscle. Hot money has become a weapon of American statecraft. Dollar hegemony gives the ability to wield hot money as a political weapon to one state. Lenins claim that his imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism was standpoint exceptionalism. Far from being the highest stage of capitalism, what these theorists were observing was (as is now obvious) a relatively early phase of capitalism. (Panitch & Ginden) The (mostly) indirect rule of 21st Century American imperialism, using its creditor status against peripheral nations and its debtor status against the metropoles, is a unique phenomenon in history. It can only be grasped in its complexity. Metropolitan states are exploited through the Treasury standard for loans the US will never pay back to finance American military profligacy for the same reason Willie Sutton said he robbed banks: Thats where the money is. Peripheral and semi-peripheral nations are subordinated through structural adjustment programs (SAPs), in part to drain value from them, but not wholly for that reason. Imperialism has an economic dimension, but it also has its political dimension, the dimension of power characterizing the whole relationship between actors. The task for SAPs is to establish the economic conditions in which such a society can become self-functioning [self policing in the international order]. There must be just enough local accumulation to permit the South to maintain some non-statist institutions or social forces which can enable it to manage its own poverty it might be possible to address the problem of governance by recognizing and validating the coping strategies which people have developed to resist social degradation, and then by calling the organizations behind these strategies NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and constituents of civil society, and using them to run society in a low-cost way without the risks of post-neo-colonial direct rule. (Biel, p. 245) This gives us good reason to examine the role of NGOs not as service agencies, but as co-optation strategies, particularly any NGO with the sanction in any country of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose actions are closely coordinated through the US Embassy with its Economics Sections and its CIA station chief. This is a dimension within the local political scene in the periphery that belies the notion of sovereignty on close examination, while superficially giving US intervention a benevolent face.

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In the peripheral or semi-peripheral (like India) states, political struggle operates along multiple axes. Its interstate dimension is in every case a struggle about how to relate to American power, a question of dependence or autarky. Its two national dimensions are the struggle between elites for control of the state apparatus and the struggle between official and grassroots power -- which unites even opposition elites, who are threatened by grassroots power. And there is a cultural-ideological dimension, one that is most marked in large, culturally diverse states, in which difference can be constructed as hierarchy or conflict by demagogues, particularly in times of deep insecurity or outright crisis. The latter is reinforced by actual structural relations within a nation-state, often called inequality, but characterized by a far less abstract relations of parasitic domination like national oppression (the modifier here used in the historical-community and not the state sense) or caste. Metropolitan political operatives have learned the cultural logic very well; and they have learned to employ destabilization -- as opposed to outright coups -- as a way to create conditions that inflame difference into conflict using external economic pressure Yugoslavia being a prime example. It was no surprise, then, that the US allied itself with Franjo Tudjman, a Croatian fascist, as part of its plan to dismantle the Yugolsav state that heroically resisted fascism during World War II under the leadership of fellow Croatian Josep Broz Tito. Fascism flourishes during times of deep insecurity. Many people have tried to describe, or even define, fascism. The problem has been that the term was invented by one kind of fascist, then applied to a couple more. So we look at Mussolini fascism, and try to determine how that is the same or different from Hitler fascism or Franco fascism. This is a very controversial topic. It seems to have class dimensions and racial dimensions. These have been studied quite a lot, and in fact have become grist for thousands of academic papers. Here are a few observations of my own, not terribly rigorous. It always seems to be a phenomenon of a middle class that has been destabilized by economic downturns. It always seems to be characterized by demagogic appeals to racial or ethnic or national superiority. It always seems to be carried forward outside the legitimated political process by an element of vigilantism. It always co-opts the most inflammatory language of the left as a kind of populist appeal, even though once in power it always secures the fortunes of the already ruling class. It comes to power politically (after it comes to prominence socially) during periods when the existing political establishment loses the confidence of the people. Last but certainly not least, it always makes powerful appeals to a kind of martial masculinity. The so-called middle class in India is in fact somewhere between 150-200 million people out of more than a billion, around 15% of the population. They are a composite of professionals, technocrats, managers, businesspeople who run franchises for the multinationals, and the recipients of political patronage. Politically, they serve as a buffer between the super-rich and the impoverished Indian masses. This stratum has certain expectations, manufactured in the Great Nation promotions of various Indian leaderships who have felt compelled to court them. Western cultural hegemony has carried with it not just neoliberal ideology, but consumerism. This intermediate class has a very high demand for consumer goods as an outward expression of its status, both national and personal. The problem is that to satisfy this demand, the Indian government has allowed India -- which does not have an industrial consumer-goods production base adequate to this need -- to run up a trade deficit. The inevitable result of 172

this, devaluation of the national currency, has been staved off for a time by the Indian governments decision not to allow full convertability for the Rupee until now. The refusal to expose the Rupee is what has, up until now, prevented a replay of Argentina in India, though growth rates, even after liberalization in the early 90s, have remained unchanged since the 80s. The fortunes of the middle class and the rich have been improved not by expansion of productive capacity, but by creaming the plunder of structural adjustment -- privatization, abandonment of government-supported social services, and fire-sale sell-offs of public assets. It has been apparent from the beginning, albeit in the outward ways presented by the market, that the fortunes of this class were tentative, especially at the bottom of this stratum. Job expansion rates, especially well-paying jobs, has actually decreased. This has only heightened the sense of insecurity among the lower middle class, and rendered them susceptible -- in the absence of an interpretive framework for understanding their situation -- to demagogy from the right. This stratum is closest to the lower classes, and is in direct contact with the agitations and deformations of poverty it looks them most directly in the face, as it were. This condition breeds a kind of political panic, and is easily directed at scapegoats. In 1925, even before the independence struggle, Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar organized Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Union) as a formation to fight for a Hindu Nation. It is a highly hierarchical organization that combines Hinduism, paramilitary practices in the form of physical exercise, and a network of local chapters (shakhas) where education involves intense, lifelong indoctrination in the organizations principles. It is always and absolutely led by one male leader, who appoints his successor. It would be easy to dismiss the RSS as an obscurantist sect, except that it has well over a million active members. Since the post-independence partition, the RSS has inflamed anti-Hindu xenophobia, and expresses a violent Islamophobia. Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, was alleged to have been a member of the RSS by his own brother in a 1994 interview, a charge bitterly denied by the RSS now. Godse was, however, beyond any doubt, a Hindutva true believer , and his public criticisms of the RSS were always that they were not aggressive enough. Since 1980, the political expression of the RSS has been the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian Peoples Party, BJP), having been earlier organized (as the Indian Peoples Union) but suffering collapse during the government of Indira Gandhi. With the insecurities that struck the lower-middle class with the introduction of neoliberalism, however, in the early 90s, the BJP went from being a marginal party to a major political force. The elite middle class had hitched its fortunes to the Washington Consensus, accepting their role as the comprador proxy for the US, and when this surrender of Indian sovereignty had its first destructive impacts on the comprador confusion, a huge faux-populist xenophobia came to the fore as an explanatory force. The rhetoric of the RSS and BJP was designed to inflame this and direct it against Muslims. (RSS ideology is also strongly anti-Christian and anticommunist, the latter betraying the reactionary character hiding under its populist rhetoric.) The Babri Masjid was a great , ancient mosque built in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 13 million Indian Muslims. Hindutva propaganda held that the mosque was built in the 16th Century (true) on top of an ancient Hindu pilgrimage location, and birthplace of Samrat Shri Ramachandra, an ostensible Hindu king and demi-god (Rama). (Not true, records actually show no special Hindu significance attached to the site until the 173

18th Century). Babri Masjid was an architectural marvel, and held immense interest for historians around the world. On December 6, 1992, incited by RSS and BJP operatives with loudspeakers, around 100,000 Hindutva fanatics converged on Babri Masjid and destroyed it, attacking Muslim residents nearby and engaging in widespread looting and vandalism. This ignited riots between Hindu and Muslim across India, including the capitol. I noted earlier that vigilantism is a consistent aspect of fascism. At Babri Masjid, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council) orchestrated much of the actual violence, and coordinated the leadership for this particular instance of vigilante violence. In response to these attacks, American neo-con propagandist Daniel Pipes, wellknown himself for his extreme Islamophobia, wrote, Ayodhya prompts several thoughts relating to the Temple Mount. It shows that the Temple Mount dispute is far from unique. Moslems have habitually asserted the supremacy of Islam through architecture, building on top of the monuments of other faiths (as in Jerusalem and Ayodhya) or appropriating them (e.g. the Ka'ba in Mecca and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople). This not only connected RSS ideology with Zionism in their respective ideologies, it presaged the natural connection that would emerge between a future BJP government and an approving Bush II administration. Exploiting the generalized insecurity amplified by neoliberal predation and disunity in the bujreuacratically moribund Congress Party, the BJP came to national power in India in 1998, and the position of Prime Minister, where most executive authority is vested, was handed to the 50-year Parliamentary veteran Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee was immediately embraced by the Clinton administration, and almost as quickly put Clinton on the spot with a series of five unannounced nuclear weapons tests that broke a decades-long moratorium (since a single such test in 1974). Pakistan replied two weeks later with its own test, ratcheting up tension around the world; and in 1999, the civilian government of Pakistan fell, once again, to an army-orchestrated coup detat, and General Pervez Musharraf installed himself as Pakistans new leader. After a decent interval, Clinton graced Vajpayee with the legitimation of a ballyhooed presidential visit in 2000. After all, good neoliberal allies in countries of over a billion people are not easy to come by; and China was cynically lining up with Pakistan for strategic reasons. The Clinton administration was then overseeing an general anti-Chinese hysteria, emblematic of which was the bizarre frame-up of Wen Ho Lee -- a Taiwanese American scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bus was appointed by judicial fiat in 2000 and took office the next January. September 11th happened, and on December 13 -- two months later -- with US troops now occupying Afghanistan, and Taliban fighters dispersed through eastern Pakistan, the Indian Parliament was attacked by Pakistani paramilitaries (killing several security guards, before themselves being killed by Indian security). Pakistan denied complicity, but this issue has not been resolved to this day. This may have been a response to Indias October surprise artillery assault launched against Pakistani positions along the Kashmir line of control. At any rate, there was now extreme tension around the world with regard to this nascent confrontation between two nuclear-armed nations. The Bush administration had thrown in its lot with Pakistan out of tactical necessity for its invasion of Afghanistan, and for now sat on the sidelines with regard to India and the BJP leadership there. There was a neoliberally-committed BJP government already in

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place, and Bush could ill afford to do more than remain quiet as his mandarins directed the latest campaign in the Energy War. Neoliberalism, Hindutva fascism, and the Energy War had now decisively converged. Perry Anderson in a 2003 interview at Berkeley noted that neoliberalism is now the most thoroughly global ideology in human history, that one can finds its adherents in think tanks and governments in any capitol in the world. He further noted that there were two contradictions carried within neoliberalism that will ultimately undermine it: ecological constraints and social polarization. I believe that is true. However, the general reaction on the Left when polarization is mentioned is to equate that solely with the contradictions contained within economic class. It is my belief that (1) neoliberalism will exacerbate these polarities and thereby strengthen the right as the guarantor of order, and (2) that the general rightward shift that lies in waiting as the logical outcome of neoliberalisms destructive trajectory brings into bold relief another social polarity that is simultaneously imbricated with class but separate from it in its character and bases -- gender. R. W. Connell, writing in his superlative book, Masculinities (University of California Press, 1995), remarked that fascism promote[s] new images of masculinity [during crises of the same], glorifying irrationality (the triumph of the will, thinking with the blood) and the unrestrained violence of the frontline soldier. (p. 193) Vinay Lal, writing about the nuclear tests under the BJP government The Cultural Politics of Indian Nuclearism) noted: The history of India's nuclear tests extends back, in a manner of speaking, to the early days of India under colonial rule. The British were apt to describe Indians as an effeminate people, leading lives of indolence and womanly softness; following the rebellion of 1857-58, the entire country was divided between martial and non-martial races. One response was to embrace a certain kind of hyper-masculinity, which would enable Indians to be construed as a people just as manly as the British. Indians have never been able to live down the taunt of effeminacy, and those who know of the cultural nuances of South Asian history are aware that some Indians imagine Pakistani Muslims as a meat-eating, virile, robust, and militaristic people. It is a telling fact that the first comment of Balasaheb K. Thackeray, the chauvinist leader of the militantly Hindu Shiv Sena party who is an open admirer of Hitler, upon hearing of the tests was, We have to prove that we are not eunuchs. In other words, prove they are not like women. The way George W. Bush does when he dressed up like a cowboy or a fighter pilot. The reason that fascism is still seen, even on the left, as a principally politicoeconomic phenomenon, with its gendered aspects a kind of barely-relevant curiosity reserved for psychoanalysts, is not that gender is -- objectively -- somehow secondary as a causative agent. The reason is that men on the right and left remain reluctant to acknowledge the centrality of gender as a system of material, ideological, and psychological power is because that acknowledgment puts their own entitlements and their own pretensions and insecurities under the bright light of criticism.

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Indias Women Many on the left actually saw the original national modernization process as one of emancipation from older semi-feudal structures as progress. In practice, however, the systems of caste and gender hierarchy that pre-existed the march to industrialization and the Green Revolution freed the upper castes and men from their paternal obligations under the old system and lowered the status of women and lower castes from subordinate to disposable. The emancipation of newly emerging middle class women was into what Maria Mies described as housewifization, and came to be identified with consumption in the public sphere and competitive sexual objectivity in the private. The number of beggars and prostitutes in the cities -- no longer able to eke out a living on the land -- exploded into the tens of millions. Men went in search of jobs in the cities, where the non-monetized subsidization of their survival by womens work in the reproductive (familial) economy helped keep wages extremely low. It was estimated by Mies, who did field work there with K. Lalitha and Krishna Kumari in 1983, that 80% of the work being done in the fields was then being done by women, who were still also performing all household tasks. This non-monetized cost of social reproduction, that kept wages low and ensured foreign and comprador profit margins sweated out of the displaced male working class (though certain industries prefer exclusively female work forces made up of women who have been economically pressed into the cities), suffered its own crisis as the women who underwrote it with their rural labor were undermined by the enclosures of monocropping agribusiness. Many NGOs on the payroll of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the World Bank, recognized this explicitly, and they began using micro-credit loans to women, ostensibly to lift them out of poverty. The program was, in fact, designed to ensure their marginal survival at a level that insured against social upheaval, while maintaining the relatively low cost of social reproduction for which womens efforts formed the foundation. Moreover, these programs ultimately failed women, because their lower social status as women left them vulnerable to newly-creative mechanisms of exploitation by men -- including husbands and landlords and now through the neoliberal relation between metropole and periphery. A striking example of the latter is the Indian womb industry. Infertile western couples, reports Bangalore journalist Sudha Ramachandran (India's new outsourcing business - wombs, Asia Times, June 16, 2006), who are seeking surrogate mothers, but would have to pay $45,000 in the US or Western Europe, can go to India to find agencies who will make a womans womb available for a mere $2,500. This is now referred to in India as reproductive tourism. With the breakup of traditional structures in India, women were not -- as predicted by many on the left -- freed from backwardness, but victimized by men whose traditional masculine identities had been thrown into severe crisis by changes in the public sector, and who sought to preserve the sole domain within which they held power -- in the private realm. Since the push to modernization as part of the nation-building project, the further instabilities and insecurities of neoliberalism, and finally the reactionary communalism of hyper-masculine Hindutva with its political expression through the BJP, violence against women has exploded in India. The incidence of battery, rape, prostitution, sexual slavery, 176

widow burning, dowry murders, honor killing, and female infanticide (associated with the burden of dowry costs) has gone up across the board. The exacerbation of ethnic rivalry, fanned by the Hindutva movement, has reignited the widespread use of rape as a weapon of ethnic warfare, which only serves to increase womens sense of dependence on their co-ethnic males in the perennial gender paradigm of obedience-for-protection. Development as a meme has concealed the terrifying reality of sexual exploitation for Indian women and children. Louis Proyect writes: When a city like Bombay is touted in the business press as a high technology beacon, they are apt to neglect mentioning that it is also home to at least 20,000 child prostitutes. Many are displayed row after row in zoolike cages. When one new victim refused to have sex, her head was banged against the floor until she lost consciousness. After she awoke, a rattan cane smeared with pureed red chili peppers was shoved into her vagina. If it is any consolation, such jobs are unlikely to be outsourced to India from the USA. The worsening condition of women in India has not gone unanswered, however. The very conditions that have shattered the foundations of traditional life and forced large numbers of women into the informal sectors with fewer traditional guarantees of paternal care (from husbands or upper-classes) have created the conditions for an increasingly powerful womens resistance that will carry with it profound political consequences. Ninety-four percent of Indias women labor in the unorganized sector, that is, in work that has no state-protections associated with it, even under contract law. This sectors women are becoming highly self-organized, most interestingly in a movement called the Self-Employed Womens Association (SEWA). Begun three decades ago by Elaben Bhatt -- a dynamic 73-year-old veteran of the Indian Independence Movement and ex-labor lawyer -- SEWA is now seen by women activists in the global South as a standard-bearer for womens leadership in the struggle against both patriarchy and neoliberalism. With almost 700,000 members in five Indian states, SEWA and its emulators are becoming a political force. Perhaps the most interesting thing about SEWA is that its politics are hardly restricted to electoralism -- a lesson activists in the West might learn. Much of its activity is responding to the specific needs of its members and the sectors they work in by creating issue campaigns and alternative institutions designed to reduce dependence on the existing system to move, so to speak, off the grid. These include issue campaigns like the Home-based Workers Campaign, the Vendors Campaign, the Forest Workers Campaign, the Construction Workers Campaign, the Water Campaign (!), the Food Security Campaign, the Campaign for our Right to Child Care, the Campaign for Recognition of Midwives, etc. Cooperatives have been established for credit, health care, child car, insurance, legal aid, capacity building and communication services. They have also taken such initiatives as creation of fodder banks to ensure the survival of livestock during drought. SEWA is now expanding into Yemen and Turkey. Politically, SEWA and other grassroots organizations form blocs with the left during elections, but not without asserting demands in exchange for their support.

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From a regional perspective, dozens of major women-led organizations have shown the most willingness to build lines of communication between India and Pakistan, where women are suffering under similar structural and cultural pressures. This will have profound social and political implications for the future, given the grotesque illusions that have been propagated about development by Indias neoliberal masters in Washington and Wall Street, and echoed by the male intelligentsia of Indias eager compradors. Development, after all, has never simply stood as the linguistic marker for social evolution, but for capitalist growth and progress predicated on the masculinist narrative of Man conquering (a female, ergo chaotic) Nature. Louis Proyect notes (Swans, March 2004), on development: Not only did [a] World Bank economist find that the ratio of per capita income between the richest and poorest nations grew by a factor of 9 to 50 between 1870 and 1960, he also projected that it would take India 377 years to erase this gap at current growth rates. If this is true for a supposedly dynamic country that is a pole of attraction for outsourced high technology, what hopes could possibly exist for the average African nation? Even if India had the patience to wait nearly 4 centuries to catch up to the United States, the reality here and in other developed countries falls far short of the image created by its paid propagandists. Carolyn Merchant, in a June 2002 interview explained to Russell Schoch of the California Monthly: Since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the mainstream story of western culture is that humanity can recover the Garden of Eden through science, technology, and capitalism by remaking the whole earth into a garden. By cutting down forests and making the desert blossom as the rose, and by creating farms on the land--and ultimately agribusiness and then shopping malls and gated communities. All of this is part of a "progressive" narrative that technology can be used to interact with and to dominate and control nature The clearest expression of it comes from Francis Bacon, who says that we can recover that right over nature which was lost to humanity. [Bacon actually used a rape metaphor. -SG] And then we lost it, in the Fall from Eden, caused by Eve. Eve is the one who exhibited the first curiosity -- one might say shes the first scientist -- and who then tempted a reluctant Adam, bringing about the Fall from Eden. So, to recover what was lost, Eve now represents fallen nature, and Adam represents the labor that must be used to refurbish the earth, through agriculture and ultimately industrial capitalism. Science, technology, and capitalism come together in the 17th century to allow a secular version of the reinvention of Eden on earth. The situation for women in the real world created behind this narrative has been a mixed result, depending on whether the women were in the overdeveloped metropoles or the underdeveloped periphery and semi-periphery. As the ecologic and energetic limits to 178

this growth continue to assert themselves as crises, however, even crises that will inevitably encroach on the metropoles themselves with more force, the social position of women will be determined by monumental social struggles. Reactionaries, attempting to re-consolidate and strengthen male social power over women, will continue to masculinze their own political narratives to catalyze male solidarity across class lines. Women themselves, however, will be uniquely positioned to develop the off-the-grid alternative economies that appear in the interstices of a system that is outrunning its own material basis. Their marginalization now may translate, with strong leadership from other women, into a basis for future political power. Women predominate the work and therefore the skills that hold together the non-monetized and local economies in most of the world. If women establish networks of strong, conscious political solidarity to get the male boot off their necks within these spheres, they will be positioned as a collective vanguard for whatever the next phase is in social development. Figures like Elaben Bhatt and Vandana Shiva now bear immense historic responsibility. It is our responsibility to pay very close attention. This applies to India, but in some ways, to the whole world. The reason it is important is that the geopolitical machinations afoot now are charged with more perilous implications -- in many ways -- than any conjuncture in human history. Shanghai & New Delhi The long term secular trends we can observe using empirical calculations already demonstrate the inevitability -- all other variable remaining the same -- of a global conflict over one of the world systems most essential material substrates: fossil energy. It is this struggle between states that has landed the US in a military and political quagmire in Iraq, and thereby ignited a quiet panic among fractions of the US ruling class that are beginning to understand exactly how reckless the Bush administration and its New Centurion advisors really are. Fixed like deer in the headlights by their own failure to appreciate the variant logics of territorial power and the atmospheric dynamics of geopolitical maneuvering, they approach the 2006 elections -- Republican and Democrat alike -- tied together by a Gordian knot of irrelevance and inertia. In May 1, 2001, before September 11 had so dramatically changed the political weather, George W. Bush, still suffering a very serious crisis of legitimacy in the wake of the 2000 elections, delivered a speech to the National Defense University. I need to quote this speech at length here, because it is as rich with retrospective insights for the reader as it is with irony. Today, the sun comes up on a vastly different world. The Wall is gone, and so is the Soviet Union. Today's Russia is not yesterday's Soviet Union. Its government is no longer communist. Its president is elected. Today's Russia is not our enemy, but a country in transition with an opportunity to emerge as a great nation, democratic, at peace with itself and its neighbors.

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The Iron Curtain no longer exists. Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic are free nations and they are now our allies in NATO, together with a reunited Germany. Yet, this is still a dangerous world; a less certain, a less predictable one. More nations have nuclear weapons and still more have nuclear aspirations. Many have chemical and biological weapons. Some already have developed a ballistic missile technology that would allow them to deliver weapons of mass destruction at long distances and incredible speeds, and a number of these countries are spreading these technologies around the world. Most troubling of all, the list of these countries includes some of the world's least-responsible states. Unlike the Cold War, today's most urgent threat stems not from thousands of ballistic missiles in the Soviet hands, but from a small number of missiles in the hands of these states -- states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life. They seek weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbors, and to keep the United States and other responsible nations from helping allies and friends in strategic parts of the world. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world joined forces to turn him back. But the international community would have faced a very different situation had Hussein been able to blackmail with nuclear weapons. Like Saddam Hussein, some of today's tyrants are gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. They hate democracy and freedom, and individual liberty. Many care little for the lives of their own people. In such a world, Cold War deterrence is no longer enough to maintain peace, to protect our own citizens and our own allies and friends. We must seek security based on more than the grim premise that we can destroy those who seek to destroy us. This is an important opportunity for the world to rethink the unthinkable and to find new ways to keep the peace. Today's world requires a new policy, a broad strategy of active nonproliferation, counter-proliferation and defenses. We must work together with other like-minded nations to deny weapons of terror from those seeking to acquire them. We must work with allies and friends who wish to join with us to defend against the harm they can inflict. And together, we must deter anyone who would contemplate their use. We need new concepts of deterrence that rely on both offensive and defensive forces. Deterrence can no longer be based solely on the threat of nuclear retaliation. Defenses can strengthen deterrence by reducing the incentive for proliferation. We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world. To do so, we must move beyond the constraints of the 30-year-old ABM Treaty. This treaty does not recognize the present or point us to the future. It enshrines the past.

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No treaty that prevents us from addressing today's threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends and our allies is in our interests or in the interests of world peace. This new framework must encourage still further cuts in nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons still have a vital role to play in our security and that of our allies. We can and will change the size, the composition, the character of our nuclear forces in a way that reflects the reality that the Cold War is over. I'm committed to achieving a credible deterrent with the lowest possible number of nuclear weapons consistent with our national security needs, including our obligations to our allies. The very next day, the normally circumspect Xinhua News Agency, echoing the sentiments of Chinese leadership, was uncharacteristically blunt. The U.S. missile defense plan has violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, will destroy the balance of international security forces and could cause a new arms race, it stated. Russia, cited repeatedly by Bushs speechwriter, was conciliatory in its rhetoric, but on June 11 launched an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile that was widely interpreted by the diplomatic corps as a warning to Bush. Ten days later, India and Russia issued a joint statement denouncing the abrogation of the ABM Treaty. During a summit between Bush and Putin in July, Putin failed to convince Bush to replace whatever was abandoned with a US-Russian bilateral agreement on nuclear weapons; but the door was left open. Both China and Russia saw, well before September 11th, that the Bush administration and its coterie were aiming directly at unipolar, uncontested American global dominance. A group of loosely affiliated nations with common border issues prefiguring the resolution of standing tensions between Russia and China, called the Shanghai Five, formally re-named themselves in June that year as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). They originally included China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, adding Uzbekistan when the re-founded; and between them they controlled the majority of the worlds natural gas supplies. As evidenced by the May Day Bush speech, the hubristic herd that was now directing the US Executive Branch, had convinced themselves of their own unstopability; and they had already begun the story-development for an attack on and occupation of Iraq. They were dismissive of the SCO, believing -- as many of the wonks did -- that the tensions between China and Russia would constitute firm limits on the SCOs capacity to function as an Asian counter-US bloc. The historical irony that would emerge on September 11th was that the common defense concerns that first brought the Shanghai Five together were based on the large number of Muslim separatist groups who had been strengthened initially by the USsponsored anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, inaugurated under the Clinton administration one alumnus of which was the intense heir of a fabulously wealthy Saudi business magnate: Osama bin Laden. In the long term, it is Chinas thirst for energy that will confront both China and the US with a dangerous political dilemma. In the near term, however, while US foreign policy has been cognizant of China, the real target of US foreign policy has been Russia. 181

Former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is often cited by the unidimensionistas of wonkery for having served on the board of an oil company and having a tanker named after her. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that she was an extremely precocious student, entering college at 15 and earning a Masters Degree by the time she was 21. Her Poli-Sci PhD was awarded in 1981 from the University of Denver on the politics of East-Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and international security policy. The preoccupation with Russia has existed since the breakup of the USSR during the Reagan administration. Rice inherited the developments since then, and with these developments a traumatized, shattered nation trying to find its way back on the world stage under the leadership of Vladimir Putin -- an ex-KGB operative who has inspired so many wildly varying interpretations of him that he appears a multiple personality. Moscow Putin keeps his own counsel, and no country has been more buffeted by history over the last two decades than Russia. For his dour and confident leadership style, which demands respect, Putins actually-existing Russia I still a deeply traumatized and weakened country. The country was looted after the fall of the USSR, its economy in tatters, and its financial system melted down in 1998. Civil society was replaced by some of the most ruthless Mafiosi on the planet. The population fell by over 11 million, as life expectancies tumbled and people quit having children, seeing no hope in the future. Putin seized the opportunities offered up by September 11 as eagerly as the Bush administration, seeing it as a possible way to secure a compact with the Americans to advance the US-Russia common interest in breaking OPEC, and reassert Russia as a world power by joining hands with the US to effectively encircle China. Mark Jones, a historian of the USSR, writing a month after the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, speculated on where this impossible alliance would eventually lead: Inevitably the most pronounced aspects of any new Russo-American realignment will not be any inherent capacity for renewed growth and progress, but on the contrary will be intensified repression, obscurantism and black reaction. It is a recipe for the further militarisation of imperialism, for the shrinking of civil society, for creating societies of total surveillance and lockdown, for intensified racism and social intolerance. This is the era of Exterminism, the highest stage of imperialism. It is also the age of Panopticon. Here too, Afghanistan is a foretaste of the future. This prescience would be qualified by emergent realities, however, that would reveal US intentions to Putin. It was Russia that was to be first encircled; and decisively subordinated within the US neoliberal order. In December 2001, after Putin had facilitated the entry of US bases into former Republics of the USSR, Bush spat on him with the formal abrogation of the ABM Treaty. Putin, however, was in no position, internationally or domestically, to assert himself; and he took the blow with equanimity. His KGB training had taught him nothing if it wasnt rapid recognition of the temporal reality of power. 182

In the same month, Seymour Hirsh, writing for the New Yorker, wrote one of two rarely erroneous stories. The second erroneous story was the alarm that the US would attack Iran this summer (which might still be proven wrong, but I doubt it). The first was the one noted above, wherein he claimed that Iran was on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons. (Hirsh needs to seriously reconsider the reliability whoever is his source on Iran stories.) Planting such a story may have reflected alarm at the fact that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of Irans Expediency Council, announced an accelerated nuclear research and development program. Which would be facilitated by Russia. Putin was not prone to talk overmuch; but his actions spoke volumes. The west still had its powerful allies inside Putins camp -- the gangster oligarchs -and Russia was still incapacitated internationally by the devastating legacy of Yeltsin. The power of Putins central government was fractured; and Putin was proceeding in cautious, well-considered phases to restore it -- a process that will not be detailed here, except to say that a nodal point was the arrest of American favorite Mikhail Khodorkovsky. On March 26, 2004, Cali Ruchala wrote (American Oligarch, the Selling of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Sobaka): For more than a decade, they were above the law, rigging auctions and using the media and even the police as extensions of vast corporate empires. The 1990s were the glory days for this small but highly publicized clique of Russian businessmen - popularly known as Oligarchs - who bought, stole, or simply took over Russia's national wealth for pennies on the dollar. But as a wonderfully colourful Japanese proverb has it, even the mighty shall be brought down low, like an evening dream in springtime. One by one the Oligarchs have been shaken from their slumbers and dragged before the courts for their misdeeds. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, subjected to corruption probes by Russian state prosecutors since 1999, fled rather than stand trial. The target of a similar probe, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested on October 25, 2003 and is currently cooling his heels in a Russian prison. These measures were wildly popular with the Russian public, appalled at both the oligarchs violence and conspicuous consumption. And Putin had largely recaptured the political prerogatives of the Russian central government. As a newly empowered Putin surveyed the geopolitical landscape, he recognized the criticality of India immediately. He also recognized how both India and Russia were positioned within the contradictory web of recent history. Indias volatile relationship to Pakistan and Chinas longstanding mistrust of India (as well as border disputes) were intersected by the tactical alliance between the US and Pakistan. And this is just a first glance. Alarmed by the implications of what it was observing in Russia, the Bush administration mobilized the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a covert ops front foundation designed to topple foreign governments by financing and training oppositions, aiming this weapon at the Russian trading partners of the former Soviet Union. The very real flaws, including autocratic methods and corruption, of the 183

leaders in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, facilitated this installment of neo-liberalfriendly comprador democrats, whose main role (designated by their US sponsors) was to reorient these nations away from Russia and toward the US. Between 2003-2005, all three pro-Russian leaders were gone. George W. Bush, whod once declared he could see Putins soul somewhere near his retinas, had declared war on Russia. In December 2004, Putin was accompanied to India by an extremely high-powered delegation from Russia for the New Delhi Summit with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Included in the delegation were Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, and the Director General of the Russian Atomic Agency. Before Putin returned to Moscow, he had in his briefcase a joint declaration of strategic partnership, a Russia-India joint space exploration agreement, a Russia-India energy cooperation agreement, and a host of new weapons sales. Manmohan Singh had Russias solemn promise to push for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with full veto power. Putin, like everyone else, knew that the button to push with the Indian political establishment was called Great Nation status. At home, Putin was in the process of nationalizing Yukos, the largest oil producing company in Russia. Shortly thereafter, Russia sold minority interests in Yukos to China and India, two oil-thirsty emerging giants. The bald attempt by the United States to establish its permanent bases in Iraq no matter the costs, and its art-deco revolutions in the former Soviet states, had served as a Joshuan trumpet; and the walls impeding the rise of some future Asian bloc were indeed tumbling down. China The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. After 9-11, Vice Admiral Cebrowski told the Bush administration that the dangers against which US forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are disconnected from the prevailing trends of globalization. Michael Hudson writes in Super Imperialism -- the Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (Pluto Press, 2003) that [t]he sense of shock at the United States rising trade and payments deficit has been lost as the deficit has been built into the world economic system. The upshot is that almost without anyone really recognizing what has been happening, Americas shift into debtor status turned the postwar into an exploitative double standard. Since the nation went off gold in 1971, the Treasury bill standard has enabled the United States to draw on the resources of the rest of the world without reciprocation, governing financially through its debtor position, not through its creditor status. As dollar debts have replaced gold as the backing for central bank reserves, and hence the worlds credit supply, the entire system would be threatened if questions into its intrinsic unfairness were reopened. 184

No nation before has ever been able to invert the classical rules of international finance. Economies that have fallen into deficit have lost not only their world power, but usually also their autonomy to manage their own domestic politics and retain ownership of their public resources and their central banks financial policy. This is still the financial and political principle that they must follow. Yet U.S. diplomats have been able to convince Europe, Asia, and the Third World -- and since 1991 even the former Soviet Union -- to reorient their economies to facilitate Americas evolution from payments-surplus to payments-deficit status. How has America been able to achieve this quid without the quo, something for nothing, a free subsidy from the worlds payments-surplus nations? For one thing, the rationale for acquiescence has shifted from an early postwar faith in American moral leadership and the rhetoric of free markets to the fear that the United States will plunge the world into crisis if it does not get its way. With the Bush administrations employment of preemptive war doctrine, it has gotten the opposite result of its original plan in Southwest Asia. Instead of compliant nations happily hosting US military lily pad bases, the US has sunk into a terrific military stalemate in Iraq, and Iran has emerged as the new regional power broker. The war itself is thoroughly financed by the system of free lunch loans (the Treasury bill standard) described by Hudson, and the plunge into crisis appears a result of reckless miscalculation as a form of cynical calculation. The neo-con global strategy has been one not of stabilization, but of destabilization, carried by the notion that the US was in a unique position to pick up the pieces afterward and reorder them to suit its own purposes. Members of the administration have displayed more than a little of the logic associated with macho adolescent boys. In that way, they have taken a baton to a hornets nest as part of their destabilization strategy, convincing themselves that somehow they themselves would be immune to the wrath of its residents. This has not increased, as many believe, interstate rivalry between the developed nations of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. For them, the acceleration of the shift from manufactured consent to naked force as the instruments of empire -- all of them implicated in neoliberalism as a collaborative system of parasitism upon the global South -was not a moral disturbance, but a crisis of legitimacy. They are all too closely identified with the United States, and too densely networked within the US-directed world system, to actually challenge the system. Their crises are domestic and political, because they themselves, following the lead of past US administrations (especially the Clinton administration), had so mystified their own constituents with regard to both economic and foreign policy with multilateralism and human rights as the cover for their own complicity in accumulation by dispossession, that the macho belligerence of the Bush administration threatens to give the game away by raising embarrassing questions. Those who were most alerted, and less surprised, by this display of military machismo were the very states which were neither as networked financially, nor as integrated politically, nor as conformed culturally to the US as the overdeveloped metropoles. What has been a surprise, and has altered political calculations around the world, is the depth and breadth of the apparent military defeat of the US in Iraq. This graphic demonstration of the falsehood of the American military-invincibility mystique has 185

crated a loss of confidence in American power, and even engendered open opposition among latent rivals, especially Russia and China. Both of these nations are perfectly cognizant of the fact that they themselves are the ultimate targets of US machinations. And both nations have a rich history of conflict in which weak forces overcame strong ones by guile and patience. In Maos articulation of guerrilla strategy he summarized: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. This is, in many respects, the opposite of the bring em on machismo of Bushs coterie of Ivy League generalissimos and business-class gangsters wielding their power like a kid who just found his dads gun. China has not been engaged in the project of modernization for 200 years. Modernization began only after the overthrow of feudalism by the Chinese Revolution in 1949 less than 60 years ago. And modernization is the framework through which to understand the actions of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Chinese realism about relative strength and weakness in the world system has, so far, served China very well, once the empirical evidence is examined. Since the Revolutions, Chinese life expectancy has gone from 35 to 70. The under-5 mortality rate has dropped from 209 to 45. Adult literacy had jumped from under 20% to 99%. But there have been tremendous setbacks and challenges as well. The shift to market socialism, the euphemism employed by Deng Xiaoping for selective integration of China into the emerging neo-liberal world system, has brought with a phenomenal growth rate, an unhealthy dependence on export, increasing social stratification, social service collapses, local bureaucratic corruption, and serious environmental problems. The details of that process, as well as any interpretation of events in China today, are poorly understood, if at all, in the West, that embraces instead monumentally silly caricature of China as a pure and obedient autocracy run by a tightly disciplined, robot-like Communist Party. It is only plain Western racism that supports such a simplistic account of a nation of 1.3 billion people that manages to maintain a viable, unitary state. The Communist Party of China is the single largest political organization in the world, with 70 million members, nearly matching the number of men, women, and children in California, Texas, and New York. It is also the most complex political organization in the world. It is rife with factions, and during the 60s, in a period called the Great Cultural Revolution, the struggle within the Party (and that is what it was, contrary to the impressions predominating in the West) over its direction between Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping led to devastating organizational wreckage and social chaos. The party was subsequently reorganized, with Dengs faction in control. Henry C.K. Liu notes (The lame duck and the greenhorn, Asia Times, June 23, 2006): Learning lessons from the damaging experience of the Cultural Revolution, in which the winner-takes-all struggle for the correct ideological line ended with unimaginable chaos and violence that threatened the very future of the party, the CCP has since adopted ways and means to smooth out the leadership transition process and to reach orderly resolutions of inevitable ideological and material conflicts in a complex socio-economic186

political system that leave room for constructive disagreement and operational compromise. It is in this milieu of complex political struggle that Chinese leadership is formed, as well as in the administration of a nation four times the size of the United States. The single most important point of unification within the Party leadership is the preservation and strengthening of Chinese independence. The shared understanding of the Party leadership is that -- while alliance of conveniences have existed and do exist -- their vast natural and human wealth is coveted, and the capacity inhering in those assets is feared by the United States. Development is seen by many as a way to become part of the modern world; but more importantly, and probably more accurately, it is seen as a prerequisite to their survival. Two years after Maos death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping implemented a reform agenda that cautiously opened Chinas economy to what was then a very nascent neoliberalism. Internationally, this meant limited access by outsiders to Chinas market (mostly limited to Guangdong); domestically, it began a very real devolution of political and economic power from Beijing toward the localities. Among the main goals of market liberalization were technology transfers. This required a strategy of state-mediated investment from abroad. While capitalist incursions into the Chinese market have been substantial, the Chinese state has maintained tight control over central banking, as a way of both insulating itself from speculative depredations and, as Harvey puts it, preventing the formation of any coherent capitalist power bloc within China itself The barriers erected by foreign portfolio investment effectively limit the powers of international finance capital over the Chinese state. The reluctance to permit forms of financial intermediation other than the stateowned banks -- such as stock markets and capital markets -- deprives capital of one of its key weapons vis--vis state power. (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 123) As part of that survival strategy, China has cynically used its most abundant asset to attract foreign investment: a sea of dirt-cheap human labor. This has attracted more than 20,000 American joint ventures. More than 100 US-based multinational corporations have invested $48 billion in China. China has used this strategy to hollow out huge sectors of US manufacturing and the cheap commodities produced there are now the lifeblood of giant US-based box-store retailers like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Target. By locking sections of the US ruling class into an economic Gordian knot, China has placed a protective shield around itself vis--vis the political-military establishment. The other way that China has established defensive leverage against the US is by buying US debt, and now holds almost $324 billion in US Treasury securities. This is not an advantage or disadvantage for China, but a case, in the Cold War nuclear vocabulary, of a standoff of mutually assured destruction. Along with Japan, that now owns $639 billion in US debt, these two Asian giants are effectively financing the war in Iraq. At this point, though they would be loathe to admit it aloud, the US entrapment in the Iraq debacle must be seen, from a Realpolitik perspective, as a net positive, and not from an economic standpoint. China knows as well as everyone else that the US will never pay off its T-bill debts; it cant. The US entrapment 187

in Iraq is creating the conditions for what China has most wanted since the collapse of the Soviet Union: an Asian bloc, with China piloting, that will create what the Chinese call global multi-polarity. While the trend, for now, is a decline in American power and the rise of China as a regional power, the economic and military disparity is still so great that China sees itself playing for time for several decades more. Chinas so-called arsenal of nuclear weapons -one of the only assurances in Bush World that prevents preemption in the eyes of many -is a meager 24 nuclear missiles deliverable to the US, compared to the 10,330 in US possession with the combined destructive power of 125,000 Hiroshima bombs. Chinas conventional military is suitable strictly for home defense, and its Navy is pitiable. The US has the capacity right now to conduct a devastating blockade China, and its string of new bases in Southwest Asia have actually tightened US encirclement. China has good reason to fear recent developments. Before 9-11, after having been briefed by the outgoing Clinton administration on the growing threat of political Islam, the Bush administration ignored those warnings, stating their belief that the real challenge to US power in the world was China, and began the build-up of a US-Japan-Taiwan theater missile defense system. This program was implicit before the Bush administration, but on April 24, 2001 -- a mere three months after having taken office by judicial fiat -- Bush announced it would do whatever it takes to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack. While many have the impression that postHiroshima/Nagasaki Japan is nuclear-phobic, the fact is Japan has prepared a nuclear arsenal -- with China as its only possible target -- that is one final step from assembly a task that could be accomplished in mere weeks. This goes a long way toward explaining Chinas hesitancy to provoke the US, even as China moves cautiously forward with its own development agenda. When the US was attacked on September 11th, China made an instant and visible show of solidarity. The left sects of the West castigated China and Russia for this support, demanding they step directly before the raging bull of a post-9-11 US. A friend of mine, himself a leftist, said recently: A weakness on the left is that we often despise complexity. The Chinese provided intelligence support to the US, and Russia green-lighted bases in the former Soviet states. Both offered support for an occupation of Afghanistan; and both had real concerns in their own fields of operations about political Islam. But when Bush attended the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Conference in October 2001, where Bush was face to face with both Jiang Zemin and Vladimir Putin, both continued to offer support, but qualified that support by saying that the United Nations was the appropriate occupation force; wondering then no doubt whether the US would install a compliant force which it eventually did: NATO. Bush, at the same conference, between the usual platitudes, threw red meat to his own right wing at home by again committing to the defense of Taiwan. It was at the same conference that Bush convinced Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to abrogate his own Constitution by sending troops abroad for the first time since World War II -- yet another indication to the Chinese and the world of the resurgence of militarism in Japan. Both the Russians and the Chinese were alerted early to US intentions when Iraq emerged as a military target, made blazingly clear in 2002. Political Islam was to be a foil for Cheneys energy team to make a bold play to put the imperial hand directly on the Southwest Asian oil tap. China was also aware that it was the principle long-range target of such a strategy. 188

Maintaining the Chinese growth locomotive would require what all growth does since the emergence of hydrocarbon capitalism: fossil energy. Oil. It was the same year, 2002, that China became the worlds second largest oil importer. In 1997, China National Petroleum Corporation, the state oil company, had signed a deal to develop the Rumailah oil field in Iraq, and Russias Lukoil had signed on for Iraqs West Qurna field. Now both were faced with the apparent attempt by the United States to seize the country as a future lever against all comers. With steep demand-increase trend-lines from both industrializing China and profligate America, there is an inevitable point that will be reached where the material antagonisms between the two nations will reach a breaking point. China wants to postpone this conflict as long as possible, and has been aggressively diversifying its oil import sources. As it expands its domestic refining capacity and establishes a strategic petroleum reserve, China is investing overseas, pursuing interests in pipelines, and developing its own natural gas industry. As it stands now, however, China has one great Achilles heel. The sea-lanes that ensure its oil imports are still controlled and protected by the United States Navy. There has been no more powerful recognition of Chinas success within neoliberalism, including its ability to employ a strong, even authoritarian, state to avoid the lethal shock treatment afforded Russia, or the ability of a culture steeped in Confucian respect for hierarchy and order, to exercise control over the anarchic and most selfdestructive tendencies of the so-called free market than the people some have come to call the neo-conservatives. Their anxiety about China as a potential competitor is matched only by their envy of the Chinese state apparatus to exercise control over its vast domestic population. There are many who emphasize the Straussian roots of neo-conservatism, its elitist conviction that societies must be welded together by some shared mytho-heroic narrative of conquest and destiny. But that is only one face of the neo-cons. The objectives that unite them are held in common with a singular conviction that liberal society, though capitalist, has gone to far in the direction of chaos, and that more autocratic social control is required to ensure domestic population control, as foreign policy is militarized. This explains the neo-con affinity for hyper-patriarchal evangelists and their need for an amorphous external enemy. This same tendency for the exertion of greater social control through obscurantist narratives and the othering of some generalized enemy is reflected in the Hindutva politics of India. In more particular terms, and going to the actual -- yet unstated -- goals behind all their blather about democracy, the neo-cons have a manifold plan: gain control of Southwest Asia; restore US global hegemony, by force if necessary; and prevent the rise of an Asian bloc. The key to the latter item in this strategy, in the view of the US, is India. And when, on July 8, 2005, India and the US signed the India-US Joint Statement (IUSJS), the final nail in the coffin of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was situated under the hammer. The true target of this policy is China. Shanghai

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It is in this contest that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has appeared on the scene, and we are about to watch the launch of the Russian oil bourse, denominated in Rubles. The denial by members that the SCO is a counter-NATO is not merely disingenuous. The SCO is still a long way from serving such a purpose if ever. With Russia the near term target of US policy since the collapse of the USSR, and China the long term target of US geo-strategic maneuvering, and Iran an intermediate target that has been put on hold by the quagmire in Iraq each of the actors in this global drama is shorn of a predictable script. The cultural analog that may be in play is that Bush grew up on television, Putin grew up with chess, and the Chinese Communist Party entertains itself with Go. Television provides a ready-made script in a Manichean universe that always has a happy ending. Chess provides unpredictability in an amoral test of competitive strategy, with the object being to simultaneously protect and defeat a king. Go, also called Igo in Japan and Baduk in Korea, is -- like chess -- what game theorists call a perfect information contest, where the actions of the opposing player are perfectly visible, while the strategy can only be inferred. The size of the Go board, however, allows multiple strategies to be pursued in conjunction with one another, which give the game a level of complexity that cannot be found in chess, and the game emphasizes the strategic value of space as well as position. It is said that Donald Rumsfeld is a fan of metrics. It is hard to believe that George W. Bush is a fan of literacy. Metrics are simply addition and subtraction of indices, dead, wounded, captured, et al. This is how he measures progress, and in Iraq it has become apparent that metrics have served him as well as metrics served Robert McNamara in Vietnam. The game of Go has so many strategic possibilities that it has proven resistant to computer programming. Computer chess programming is childs play by comparison. Go is resistant to programming for four reasons: (1) the condition of victory is optimized, or measured through maximizing or minimizing something objective, like space, without a decisive qualitative stroke, such as capture of a King, (2) the massive numbers of games possible on the large board (9.3 x 10 to the 567th power, without capture) (There are an estimate 10 to the 90th power of protons in the visible universe.), (3) a Ko rule stipulating no recreation of board positions from stalemates with the potential for an infinite reciprocity of capture, and (4) the high value of pattern recognition. The Chinese have never felt the cultural attachment of the West to zero-sum games. The point of this digression is to say that this administration may be playing well over its head. The establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was a strategic masterstroke. The question is, will India pay attention? There are some indications that it may. In spite of Indias cozying up to the US on the issue of nuclear development, this year Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukhejee negotiated the signing of a first-ever defense cooperation agreement with China, after which China hosted visits from the Indian National Security staff, and a parliamentary delegation. President Hu Jintao will visit India later this year. SCO heavyweight Russia is negotiating for a natural gas pipeline from Iran to India. Russia and Iran are the two largest natural gas producing countries. There could be a natural gas OPEC in the offing, and India as well as China would be the primary beneficiaries.

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Russia, China, and India share security concerns about armed political Islamist groups. Russia has oil for sale, too. India and Russia are two huge and hugely needed alternative export markets for Chinese manufacture if it is to disentangle itself from the US. It is hard to tell whether the absence of Prime Minister Singh at the June SCO Conference was merely to avoid being seen with Iranian President Mahmoud Amedinijad prior to his July meeting with Bush on the nuclear deal. But what is interesting is who was sent in his place: Oil Minister Murali Deora. What will be even more interesting is whether the Bush government will be able to compel the Singh government, with the lever of the nuclear deal, to censure Iran in the United Nations, even as the Russian engineers are troubleshooting a pipeline to deliver Iranian natural gas to the energy-hungry Indian doorstep. The warning from China this year, on the other hand, that ruble convertability and a Moscow ruble-oil bourse was premature, a fight at close quarters (Peoples Daily), may have been an attempt to pass along wisdom to an ally, but it may have been motivated by Chinas exposure to a weakening dollar which could become considerably weaker if Putins gamble pays off. The Chinese predicated their own analysis on the dire consequences of a sudden drop in oil prices (high oil prices undoubtedly have played a significant role in pulling Russia out of its economic slump); but the Chinese, publicly at least, deny the reality of a current and irreversible oil peak. The situation is not a tug-of-war, or even multiple tugs-of war. It is perfectly unpredictable. By perfectly, I mean just that -- an aspect of complexity that can create patterns within which there is never a perfect repetition of any other iteration. The best model I can think of to represent the current geopolitics of the Energy War is the Lorenzian water wheel. Adeel Aslam Bhutta describes the Lorenzian water wheel as having about eight buckets spaced evenly around its rim with a small hole at the bottom of each. The entire system was placed under a waterspout. A slow, constant stream of water was propelled from the waterspout; hence, the waterwheel began to spin at a fairly constant rate. Lorenz decided to increase the flow of water, and, as predicted in his Lorenz Attractor, an interesting phenomenon arose. The increased velocity of the water resulted in a chaotic motion for the waterwheel. The waterwheel would revolve in one direction as before, but then it would suddenly jerk about and revolve in the opposite direction. The filling and emptying of the buckets was no longer synchronized; the system was now chaotic. Lorenz observed his mysterious waterwheel for hours, and, no matter how long he recorded the positions and contents of the buckets, there was never and instance where the waterwheel was in the same position twice. The waterwheel would continue on in chaotic behavior without ever repeating any of its previous conditions. The flow of water is a physical analog for time. As the pace of events increases, the number of points of instability in any complex system also increases, and concomitantly the systems general unpredictability.

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When we look at the geopolitics of today, to which India has now been centrally drawn, the pace of the Cold Wars rivalries, and its impact on the world system, seems almost stately. A first tipping point came with the economic crisis that hit the US around 1970 as a result of, among other things, the Vietnam occupation. This was over 30 years after World War II had started, the last major punctuation. Then the time from Nixons resolution in 1973 until the break-up of the Warsaw Pact alliance was another 26 years. But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the invasion of Iraq took a mere two and a half years. Ten years later, the World Trade Center crashed into a toxic dust cloud, and one and a half years after that the US invaded Iraq again, this time to stay. As the flow of time through this Lorenzian waterspout accelerates, each of these actors, while exercising some agency, is also being tossed back and forth by the chaos that inheres in that acceleration. And as Lorenz, both a mathematician and meteorologist, noted when asked a question about the governments attempts to control the weather: such a hopelessly hubristic attempt at control is doomed from the start -- you can certainly change the weather just as you can shuffle a deck of cards, but whether that change produces good or bad luck is beyond your control. Lorenz also posited the notion of a form of stability inside chaotic systems, and called it the attractor. It is seen as a balance to entropy (the tendency toward higher levels of disorder). In nature sans Homo sapiens sapiens, these attractors occur through emergence alone. In society/nature, it has proven possible, albeit with very imperfect predictability, to generate attractors -- some churches being a common example. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an attempt to create a counter-pole of attraction to the system of dollar-hegemony as that system has begun a series of catastrophic bifurcations. Liu Jianfei teaches at the International Strategic Research Center of China's Central Communist Party School. Writing August 19, 2006, in the Peoples Daily Online, Liu pointed to the hypocritical stance of the United States with regard to Iran. The reason why the whole world has been paying close attention to Iran's nuclear issue is that the thorny problem does not only relate to nuclear proliferation and regional security issues, but also, if not handled properly, will strike against world oil supply, jeopardize energy security and affect the prosperity and stability of world economy. Once the global economy becomes turbulent and unstable, the vast majority of the countries in the world would not be able to conduct themselves virtuously. Although energy security is treated as a part of non-traditional issues, it will affect the traditional military security and influence international relations. In recent years many disputes have arisen between different countries as a result of energy entanglements. If not tackled properly, these disputes will seriously affect the relations between states, especially between big powers, which will eventually undermine the regional stability. How to address energy security issues is a major problem facing the entire contemporary world. Some countries treat the energy issue by using traditional realism thinking and make indiscreet remarks or criticisms on some developing countries increasing energy demand. They drum for

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energy threat theory. It seems that they are the only eligible countries to consume energy on the earth. In his very Chinese idiom, Liu puts his finger directly on US Imperial Exterminism -- the only eligible countries to consume energy on the earth. Meanwhile, investment executive, Henry CK Liu, writing from Manhattan, remarks on the soon-to-be-opened Moscow Oil Bourse, Russian oil denominated in rubles will create a global demand for rubble to make it an alternative reserve currency for international trade, given that Russia is the second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia and the Russian economy, unlike that of the Saudis, is big enough to absorb huge amounts of rubble the Russain government can print. This will transform Russia overnight into a global financial power. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the manifestation a joint ChineseRussian strategy to counter a strategy in Washington called the Great Central Asia Policy, with Afghanistan as its military anchor, that was to conquer the former Soviet satellite states and encircle China. As this strategy meets resistance from Central Asia itself, Washington has now vested its greatest hopes for salvaging this policy in India. The Indian Crossroad As a great admirer of the work of Seymour Hersh, I was disappointed to hear him leading the collective panic attack about the alleged US plan to attack Iran in the Summer of 2006. Scott Ritter and others joined the chorus. In a January 2006 article for From the Wilderness (Bombing Iran? Dont count on it.), I stated that an attack by either the US or Israel-as-proxy against Iran would (1) lead to a rapid US defeat in Iraq, (2) destabilize USclients in the region, and (3) be perceived (correctly, in my view) as an attack on China (who gets 13% of its imported oil from Iran). The speculative dates for said attack ranged within July and August 2006. Regardless of the 20/20 foresight of clairvoyant military analysts like yours truly, any head of state that underestimates the recklessness of the Bush administration or the Israelis would be imprudent. Who could have known that the US-supported Israeli destruction of Lebanon (as a psyop warning to Iran) would have taken place, much less led to the stunning strategic defeat of Israel? Not surprisingly, Iran launched some very well-publicized war games in August 2006. What many people do not realize, however, is that these were coordinated with war games by something called the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO). Like the SCO, the existence and significance of this formation has gone largely unnoticed by the general public in the United States, whose collective attention span on foreign policy never exceeds the time and active intensity required to watch a Hollywood film. The CSTO is billed as an anti-terrorism coalition between member states Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. These joint military exercises in August 2006 happened alongside Iranian exercises next door. Iran is being courted for membership in the SCO. Russia and China, the SCO founders, held joint military exercises in August of 193

last year (2005). This may not set the average American on a worry path, but it is making Pentagon planners and Dick Cheney itch like they have crablice. In light of the US Great Central Asia Policy for imposing its will on the region, this development, while not as sexy for prime time as the disaster in Iraq and the fulminating disaster in Afghanistan (US troops will always attract US journalists after all), the CSTO and its war games, at this point in time, are every bit as significant to the future of geopolitics especially to India. (One of the conditions of the US-India deal will certainly be that India joins the US in its harassment of Iran.) In particular, we need to understand Kazakhstan. It is not only a large nation strategically located along the borders of Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Caspian Sea, it is an energy state that is seen as crucial to Indias future energy security and development. In 2002, Meena Singh Roy, reporting for the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, a New Delhi-based think-tank, wrote: [A key] factor making Kazakhstan important for India is its energy resources and economic potential. In this perspective, the energy issue certainly deserves particular attention. India remains an energy deficient country and needs to ensure a better supply. In Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are the principal resource-rich countries. In the first half of the twenty first century, India will be one of the top five consumers of energy. Currently, most of Indias import comes from the Persian Gulf region, but to enhance its energy security India needs to look at an alternative source of energy. In this respect the Caspian region can be an alternative source for India since this region is considered to have the proven reserves of 25 to 30 billion barrels of oil. In Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are, the principal resource-rich countries. Kazakhstan has been termed the Second Kuwait on the basis of its petrol reserves. In CIS, Kazakhstan is the second-largest petroleum producer after Russia. In 1996, 4,600,000 barrels per day were extracted, with 40 per cent of this sold in the international market. Its share of world production is at par with that of countries like Syria and Brazil. According to the Kazakh Deputy Minister for Economy and Trade, Galum Orzabekov, Kazakhstan is expected to extract over 46 million tonnes of oil and gas condensate in 2002. The opening of (US$2.6 billion) Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) which runs from the Tengiz oilfield in Western Kazakhstan to Russia will pump around 6,00,000 barrels of oil to the west from Central Asia each day. This is a significant development. Analysts feel that with the opening of this pipeline the non-Gulf oil is likely to become more attractive to global oil consumers. While this share of production overall is not particularly impressive, proximity to India, and the regions promising natural gas deposits makes it critical to India. But perhaps more important to India in both the near and long term is Kazakhstans emerging political significance. The other country to watch is Ukraine. Kazakhstan joined Russia earlier this year in yet another acronym-laden venue, the EEC, or Eurasian Economic Community, which included all the aforementioned *stans, as 194

well as Belarus. The leaders of the EEC met in the same month as the military exercises at Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, at Vladimir Putins invitation. In a way, EEC and CSTO are mutually reinforcing, writes M K Bhadrakumar, former Indian Ambassador to Uzbekistan (Asia Times, August 25, 2006). The Russian thinking seems to be that the CSTO will in effect be transformed into the politico-military wing of the EEC. At Sochi, Putin touched on this when he said, You cannot advance the economy without first ensuring security. Uzbekistan's decision early this year to join the EEC and its subsequent decision to return to the fold of the CSTO have given a significant boost to the integration processes that Russia has been seeking. What is taking place, in essence, is that the post-Soviet states that have been tacitly encouraged by Washington to apply breaking mechanisms on the path of the integration processes so as to subvert the CIS from within - principally, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan - are being quietly sidelined, while the others are preparing to move forward. Ukraine falls in a category by itself. In fact, a significant point about the Sochi summit was the presence of Ukraine's pro-Russia prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich. To be sure, there is a hint somewhere that with the collapse of the orange coalition in Kiev, Russia hopes to involve Ukraine in deeper integration, and Yanukovich himself may have meaningfully scheduled his first visit to Russia after assuming office this month to coincide with the EEC summit in Sochi. This is a direct Russian challenge to the US grand strategy for Central Asia, and one that is apparently going to succeed. The establishment of a customs union at Sochi, with Kazakhstan and Russia at its core -- while it may bore CNN spectators -- is a brilliant and audacious move toward reintegration in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the refusal of membership to the WTO -- fundamentally a US decision -- in momentous August 2006, Russia has now formed a regional economic entity, soon to be supplemented by a very desirable Moscow oil bourse, that is virtually impenetrable by the US. Bhadrakumar goes on to say: The US strategy must be seen against the backdrop of the unprecedented expansion of US influence in South Asia in the period postSeptember 11, 2001, especially in India. Washington is evidently counting on New Delhi and Kabul as its critical partners in the Great Central Asia policy. Afghanistan is geographically an important channel connecting Central Asia with South Asia. As regards India, Washington has been focusing on New Delhi as its key strategic ally in South Asia and as a counterweight to China. The Great Central Asia policy plays on New Delhi's manifest aspiration (with indifferent results so far) through the past 15 years to be an effective participant as a great power in the affairs of Central Asia.

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In other words, Washingtons flattery of Indian leadership, its support of the atavistic Indian right-wing, and its willingness to abrogate the NPT to let India develop its great power bomb, are more than ideological affinity. Washington is calling India a great power, but it is using Indias leadership as a pawn. While it would be in Indias national interests to support and even join the SCO, the CSTO, and the EEC -- where combined with the energy might of the EEC and the economic checkmate of the US by China, India would exercise its greatest and probably most beneficial influence on the outcomes of global history, the Singh government, like the BJP before them, seems it is being pulled into the neo-con portfolio as just another postcolonial comprador state tucked into the imperial briefcase of the US. It has even gone so far as to offer support for Israel. While there is certainly an element of bald opportunism involved in Indian sycophancy as the Singh government awaits finalization of the US-India nuclear agreement, supporting Israel under any circumstances is always a risky diplomatic and political venture. Failing to condemn the outrageous recent destruction of Lebanon, as Manmohan Singh did, is so appalling that it shocked the whole Indian public. It was not until the Qana attack that the Singh government condemned the Israelis, hesitating even after the Israelis killed an Indian member of the UN Interim Force. Over 12,000 Indians worked in Lebanon before it was destroyed by Israel. Even then, the condemnation was tepid. India could pay a huge diplomatic price for this overpowering desire to perceive itself as a legitimated, nuclear, and manly great nation. Satyagraha is the Hindi word for non-violent resistance. It is a thoroughly Gandhian concept. In April 1973, a sports corporation won permission from the government to begin felling trees near the village of Mandal, in Uttar Pradesh, near the Nepalese border. A local organizer, Chandi Prashad Bhatt, who had learned his political trade as a devout Gandhian involved in land use struggles throughout India, had noticed that women were the people most involved in the work of maintaining life and community; that is, gathering food, water, and fuel. His organization in Uttar Pradesh had four priorities: organizing women, resisting alcohol abuse (which often led to the battery of women), the right to use the forests in sustainable ways, and the establishment of locally controlled, forest-use economics. There is a well-known Indian legend about a girl named Amrita Devi, who gave her life protecting the trees from a greedy Maharajahs tree-fellers, by hugging the trees to put herself between the cutters and the trees. Bhatt used the legend to suggest a womens strategy to the community of Mandal, and the women did precisely that. They formed circles around the trees to stop the loggers. Chipko means to cling, but the meaning for locals translated into tree-huggers, now a common epithet for environmentalists. The actions of the Mandal women resonated so strongly with other women in the rest of Uttar Pradesh, and the tactic multiplied so rapidly and effectively that the government was forced to quit letting private logging contracts by December of the same year. The movement began to refer to itself as the Chipko Movement. In Ecology and the Politics of Survival (Sage Publications, 1991), Vandana Shiva described the evolution of the Chipko Movement from a local struggle over land use into a more general political and ideological one:

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In the final analysis, the dichotomy between 'development' and environment can be reduced to what is 'development' and how scientific knowledge is generated and used to achieve it. This dichotomy is clearly enunciated in the two slogans on the utility of the Himalayan forests-one emanating from the ecological concepts of Garhwali women, the other from the sectoral concepts of those associated with trade in forest products. When the Chipko movement evolved into an ecological movement in Adwani in 1977, the spirit of public interest ecological science was captured in the slogan: 'What do the forests bear? Soil water and pure air'. This was a response to the commonly accepted, partisan science based slogan: 'What do the forests bear? Profit on resin and timber'. The insight in these slogans symbolised a cognitive shift in the evolution of Chipko. The movement underwent a qualitative transformation from being based merely on conflicts over resources to conflicts over scientific perceptions and philosophical approaches to nature. This transformation also led to that element of scientific knowledge which has allowed Chipko to reproduce itself in different ecological and cultural contexts. The slogan has become the scientific and philosophical message of the movement, and has laid the foundations of an alternative forestry science which is ecological in nature and oriented towards public interest. The commercial interest has the primary objective of maximising exchange value through the extraction of commercially valuable species. Forest ecosystems are therefore reduced to timber mines of commercially valuable species. 'Scientific forestry' in its present form is a reductionist system of knowledge which ignores the complex relationships within the forest community and between plant life and other resources like soil and water. Its pattern of resource utilisation is based on increasing 'productivity' on these reductionist lines. By ignoring the systems linkages within the forest ecosystem, this pattern of resource use generates instabilities in the ecosystem and leads to a counter-productive use of natural resources at the ecosystem level. The destruction of the forest ecosystem and the multiple functions of forest resources adversely affects the economic interests of those groups of society which depend on the diverse resource functions of forests for their survival. These include soil and water stabilization and the provision of food, fodder, fuel, fertiliser, etc. Forest movements like Chipko are simultaneously a critique of reductionist 'scientific' forestry and an articulation of a framework for an alternative forestry science which is ecological and can safeguard public interest. The Chipko Movement is a very real political force in India today, and it bears watching for the same reasons the struggle of the Bolivian cocaleros bore watching as few years ago. It is a combination of anti-imperial nationalism with a strongly indigenous , and therefore durable and self-organizing character. Chipko women are doing two important things: they are actively avoiding assimilation into the neoliberal order under the command of the Indian central state; and they are actively confronting the homogenization narrative of industrial capitalist patriarchy. In the more specific instance of Indian culture, they are also challenging the powerful artifacts of the caste system. 197

The other force that has to be mentioned behind the scenes, because it is currently resurgent, is Naxalism. Naxalism is the Indian expression of Maoist Peoples War doctrine. Recently, none other than The Economist, the chief organ of neoliberalism, has said about Naxalism, Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong points-its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most. Naxalism is a real movement, a real armed insurgency, and it has a real popular base. Obviously, it is does not share the commitment of the Chipko women to satyagraha. It has to be seen in a combined context with Chipko, nonetheless, because in very different ways, each of these movements is confronting neoliberalism in the countryside in its respective geographic area of influence. Naxalism and Chipko both appeal to those who suffer most from caste hierarchies. And Naxalism and Chipko are movements physically situated atop vast stretches of extractable profits. The Naxalites, in particular, are on top of Indias main fossil energy resource, its coal. [I]n essence, writes Jeremy Carl (Hidden civil war drains India's energy, Asia Times, April 9, 2006) the core of the Naxalite rebellion can be seen as a response by many of Indias poor against a perceived expropriation of their natural resources by the state. Indias coal mafias largely control the industry, notorious for its poor infrastructure and corruption, while union leaders, mine managers and politicians routinely skim substantial profits from the state-owned coal companies. Meanwhile, the poor, largely tribal communities that make up much of the heart of Indias coal country, see precious little of the profits while suffering substantial environmental destruction and feeling the effects of public corruption. The Naxalites have at least some presence in almost half of Indias 28 states, and in some of the poorer and most heavily tribal states, particularly Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkand and West Bengal, they are a major political force. These five states account for about 85% of Indias coal resources, and continued disruption and deterioration of the political environment could have profound consequences for both India and its neighbors. The Naxalites have organized an armed rebellion on the coalfields that provide 75% of Indias electricity, when Indias growth spurt depends utterly on employment in the information technology sector yes, the sector that is supposed to de-materialize economies. Between January and July of this year (2006), Naxalite guerrillas killed at least 105 security personnel in their areas of operation. Whole sections of India stretching from Bangalore in the south up a corridor through Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, to the Nepalese border (southeast of Chipko-land), are now no-go areas for Indian security forces, and Naxalites collect taxes from businesses that wish to operate in their areas. Mumbai, well over on the west coast neednt concern itself with Naxalite attacks on the capitol, but the coal along the Naxalite Corridor is all that keeps Mumbais lights burning.

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Military Maoism is an anachronism, except where it is not. In Nepal, it was instrumental in bringing down the monarchy this year. Its catechisms are worthy of satire in the overdeveloped world, but in those regions where semi-feudal relations are still definitive of society, like Nepal, like Haiti, and like the Naxalite Corridor of India, Peoples War is not only a viable political doctrine, it is one for which the modern capitalist military has no response that will not exacerbate the central governments woes. One must wonder whether Manmohan Singhs UPA government is willing to see American Blackhawk helicopters over Chhattisgarh as part of his new, nuclear friendship with the US-Israeli axis or if the US could respond even if it were begged. The American Army and Marine Corps are still being ground down in Iraq. Neo-liberalism does not create its adversaries in the form of states. It is the state that, for many reasons, finds neo-liberalism an irresistible force. Neo-liberalism creates its opposition inside the belly of the state. It will remain to be seen, with regional counter-hegemony on the conference tables of Eurasians, whether Manmohan Singh or his political heirs will turn away from the Russians and Chinese, play the role of Esau, and sell the Indian birthright for the pottage of nuclear masculinity. In the short term, the issue at hand is whether the Bush administration will succeed in co-opting India and therefore succeed in at least putting the brakes on the ambitions of the SCO. In the medium term, the question is whether either India or the United States will maintain financial stability for key sections of the population and thereby assure domestic political stability. In India, this will depend largely on whether the Indian Left within the UPA abandons its Comintern conservatism and demonstrates more trust of the masses. The fault lines in India are already clear, and the fresh convertability of the Rupee (a demand of the neoliberal boss) will only exacerbate the immiseration of the Dalit and the insecurity of the so-called middle class. In the United States, the tipping point will be decided specifically by the waves around the boat, but will involve and be precipitated by the increasingly top-heavy load of personal debt. In the long term, there is peak oil which the international Left still, for the most part, studiously ignores (and sometimes denies), sharing with other tendencies of thought their technological optimism and their tendency to whistle past the graveyard of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Imbricated within the actualization-by-degrees of peak oil is the advance on international Exterminism directed at the weakest and the host of ecological crises associated with the decline of hydrocarbon humanity, i.e., water shortage, soil destruction, food insecurity, fishery depletion, deforestation, and climate instability. The way forward, for India and the world, is in reestablishing genuine cooperative communities with a high degree of Polanyian embeddedness, a political commitment to sustainability in food, water, and energy, and feminism. The latter will be controversial (as if the former two arent), so I need to explain what I mean by the term and its application. I will begin by inserting the text of an earlier reaction piece I did on the Balochistan rebellion in Pakistan, Indias perennial adversary and neighbor, after the killing of Nawab Bugti. On August 27, 2006, an artillery round fired by the Pakistani military found its mark on a cave in Pakistans southwestern province of Balochistan, bordering both 199

Afghanistan and Iran, and killed an 80-year-old man with a magnificent white beard. His name was Nawab Akbar Bugti, and he was the leader of a popular political movement in Pakistans largest geographical province. Balochistan has only four percent of Pakistans population, though it occupies 44% of Pakistans land mass. Like its neighbor, Afghanistan, it is populated by religiously conservative ethnic Pashtuns living in extremely rugged and mountainous terrain. Like its neighbor, Iran, it possesses a geologic relic in abundance: fossil fuel, in this case the Sui natural gas field that produces 45% of Pakistans supply. It also contains a warm water port -- Gwadar -- only 70 kilometers from the Iranian border. The killing of Bugti has resulted in a province-wide rebellion in the very region that is now serving as the jumping off point for a resurgent Taliban, dominated by co-ethnic Pashtuns, to retake Afghanistan. This is not happy news for the Bush administration. It may be even more disturbing to the administrations sycophant ally, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The deeper significance of this latest blunder-catalyzed rebellion, however, must be sought in a broader, more tendential account of its history. In 1991, after shattering the vibrant, modern state of Iraq with air power, President George Herbert Walker Bush unabashedly embraced the almost Hitlerian phrase New World Order as the mantra of American triumphalism. Yet NWO was merely a place marker, another cheap ruse designed to paper over the fact that the US was pursuing its own most narrow interests and suggesting to the credulous that what is good for America is good for the world. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), facilitated and encouraged by the United States as a way of bleeding the Iraqis to bleed the Iranians, while the US figured out what it needed to do in the uni-polar, post-Soviet world. While the popular idea is that the US was surprised by the fall of the Soviet Union, it was only the precipitous collapse that was a surprise. Containment had been abandoned in favor of rollback during the Carter administration, when Brzezinski engineered the Afghanistan trap which was the biggest covert operation in history. The advantages of the Soviet Union as a world system stabilizer (bipolarity) were seen as lost after the US defeat in Vietnam. The national liberation movements in the Global South had been effectively coopted with legitimating (and completely fraudulent) import substitution strategies as cover for underdeveloped nations elites repressing their local populations in exchange for higher rents for their resources and cheap labor. While neither the right nor the left was willing to see it at the time, developmental modernization was running into the physical limits of socalled growth (the fraud within the aforementioned fraud). When the promises of modernization failed to materialize for the peripheries and most of the semi-peripheries, and all that was left in the ruins were alienated masses, whose very spirituality was assaulted in the name of progress, co-opted secular nationalism, militarized socialism, and western capitalism were all implicated, and only the latter stood to manage the aftermath. Modernisation had attacked the spirituality of mass cultures, considering it as part of the traditional constraints on development which needed to be uprooted in the cause of progress, writes Robert Biel (The New Imperialism - Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations, Zed Books, 2000). Pre-revolutionary Iran was typical of this sort of modernizing model. With its aura of progressive cultural nationalism, which was quite phony and hollow. (P. 255) 200

Even as the US was financing military political Islam to break the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the same contradiction had risen up in their favorite regional client state and precipitated the political crisis that ended the Carter administration. The Reagan administration prioritized unipolarity by secretly arming the Iranians to finance Reagans terror war against Nicaragua, and turning to the Saudis for assistance in breaking the now doddering Soviet Union. The Saudis dropped the price of oil -- the Soviet Unions primary source of development capital -- by flooding the market, at the behest of CIA Director Bill Casey; and Reagan initiated Star Wars as a way of ramping up the cost of an arms race the Soviet Union could no longer afford. Casey, who developed this coup de grace strategy, never had a shade of ambiguity about his intent, or that this was a continuation of American policy that began with the Carter administration. Unipolarity is not an invention of the Bush II administration. It has been on the agenda since 1975. But it could not be legitimated by calling it unipolar American world power. It had to be called, as Bush the Elder did, the New World Order. after the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the US had given the same World a graphic demonstration -especially with the post-surrender massacre along the Iraqi highway of death on February 26-7, 1991 -- of what the Order might look like in the event of disobedience. What the US discovered, however, and is still discovering, was that it is not capable of managing unipolarity. This is a knowledge that cannot be acknowledged, and there is the rub as they say. Regardless of its attempt to restructure the world system, to establish the New World Order, the uni-polar boss, the US, remained a state in a system where a dominant state can only manage an inter-state system. The state is dominated above all else by a territorial logic, secondarily by a military logic, and finally by an administrative logic. The economic logic that supports the Northern elite, i.e., American capitalists and their business partners, however, cannot be restrained by territorial boundaries. Capital accumulation restricted to one country, or even one region, eventually experiences its own limits in the forms of overcapacity and the class antagonisms that come to the surface with mass unemployment and dispossession. The accumulation process requires two key inputs that concretely characterize the New World Order: new exploitable peripheries to absorb the crises that politically threaten elites within the core, and energy. David Harvey, in his book by the same name as Biels (The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, 2003), points out, What Arrighi refers to as the territorial and capitalist logics of power are rather different from each other. To begin with, the motivations and interests of agents differ. The capitalist holding money capital will wish to put it wherever profits can be had, and typically seeks to accumulate more capital. Politicians and statesmen typically seek outcomes that sustain or augment the power of their own state vis--vis other states. The capitalist seeks individual advantage and (though usually constrained by law) is responsible to no one other than his or her immediate social circle, while the statesman seeks a collective advantage and is constrained by the political and military situation of the state and is in some sense or other responsible to a citizenry, or, more often, an elite group, a class, a kinship structure, or some other social group. The capitalist operates in continuous space and 201

time, whereas the politician operates in a territorialized space and, at least in democracies, in a temporality dictated by an electoral cycle. On the other hand, capitalist firms come and go, shift locations, merge, or go out of business, but states are long-lived entities, cannot migrate, and are, except under exceptional circumstances of geographical conquest, confined within fixed territorial boundaries. (P. 27) In the US attempt to manage unipolarity by imposing an inter-state system of administration (political and economic) on the rest of the world, it was faced with a new military and political reality that is confronting the limitations of a state in the face of nonstate actors, and the limitations of a state (conventional) military in the face of non-state, yet organized, military actors who are not constrained by territorial logic. The very non-state forces that were used for the rollback of the Soviet Union have proven as impervious to their former sponsors as they were to their former enemies. September 11th proved something to us, but we were so fixated on the images and our own visceral reactions that we largely failed to grasp what had been proven. The developed world, the metropolitan core countries, and especially the uni-polar lead actor, the United States, is now territorially trapped, not only in tall buildings (the targets of 9-11 were not designed to inflict the maximum casualties, but for their strategic and symbolic value); we live adjacent to thousands of nuclear, chemical, and biohazardous facilities that cannot be militarily secured and that are essential for continued capital accumulation -- each and every one of them, in the words of Gordon Thompson, a pre-deployed weapon of mass destruction waiting to be activated by an enemy. Moreover, we are utterly dependent on an infrastructure of vulnerable electricity grids and a long-distance economy entirely built around personal automobiles that require uninterrupted and massive inputs of oil. The territorial logic of the US state sits atop this territorial reality at the beginning of the 21st Century. Somalia had already shown the United States that [I]f the problem of social dislocation takes a military expression, it may give the impression that it would be solved by military intervention, but practice has shown that this is not the case. (Biel, p. 259) This is not merely the case for the core, put for peripheral client states as well. Now the United States has failed in its attempt to impose a client state where a recalcitrant state was summarily shattered by military force, and it is facing a world historic military-political defeat in Iraq, even as it finds it almost impossible, politically, to extricate itself. We may witnessing an epoch that will be seen by future historians as the obsolescence of the uni-polar dominant state in the capitalist world system even as it is born. The rebellion in Balochistan is symptomatic of this phenomenon, and at the same time territorially within the vortex of this strategic crisis for the United States. The chickens, as Malcolm X once said, are coming home to roost. Musharraf has lived in political purgatory ever since 9-11. On the one hand, Pakistan has a substantial population of Pashtuns who are sympathetic to the Taliban who remain hostile to Musharraf for his acquiescence to the US. His own security and intelligence apparatuses are full of political Islamists; and the two attempts on his life in December 2003 were almost certainly inside jobs, or his locations during each would not have been known. The attack that killed Bugti, speculates Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief, was intentionally committed by members of the Army, against orders, with the goal of destabilizing Musharraf. 202

Already, a state of virtual martial law has been imposed, as protests have spread to Karachi. The American FBI, that was operating in Balochistan, has been effectively neutralized; and there are suggestions that well-armed Balochi nationalists will soon be assisting in a fresh Taliban offensive against NATO occupation forces. The old regionally coherent order in South and Southwest Asia, strategically essential to the inter-state system as a whole, is in jeopardy. Welcome to the New World Order. India Epilogue --Autonomy and Re-localization Harvey attributes multiple potential functions to the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq: to ensure US control over the supply of oil to economic and strategic competitors; to prevent the formation of a Eurasian power bloc; to impose a new sense of social order at home by breaking with the dissolute ways of the 1990s. -Arrighi So we see here the confluence of the territorial, the political, and the economic; and with those who emerged from the Marxist intellectual tradition, like Arrighi and Harvey, the analysis of class conflict is both constant and given. I myself have laid claim to that tradition more than once, because it so often works and that is the real test, isnt it? But it doesnt always go far enough, and the stopping point seems to be those places where the political expression of Marxism and capitalism were -- in practice -- so similar. That shouldnt surprise anyone, given that both the dominant system and the resistance to it can trace their intellectual origins to the Enlightenment. This is where we have to go deeper, in my opinion, in two key respects: with the incorporation of ecological science, to include the impacts of complexity theory on socalled hard science, and with what Catharine MacKinnon called feminism unmodified. The combination of these two critical methods has been tentatively accomplished by eco-feminism, and not too surprisingly, one of the leading lights of this combined critical orientation has been none other than Indian activist Vandana Shiva. Socio-politically, that is, clinically looking at the situation in India as a way of relating to the world system, and extrapolating from the specific to the general, the death of technocratic developmentalism as a legitimate discourse (it is still deployed ubiquitously as plain instrumental propaganda), as the finite limits of resource extraction assert themselves, leads inevitably to one conclusion. Whatever the theoretical or cultural trappings, some form of re-localization must happen if we are to avoid both social and ecological catastrophe (these are separate only as analytic categories). Obviously, there are complexities from the institution of the state all the way to bioregions, as well as cultural obstacles too numerous to count. But the practical centerpiece of any long-term solution is re-localization. As it stands, however, relocalizaton has many advocates who have failed to grasp the historical and cultural connections between patriarchy and our general disenchantment with and alienation from nature. Vandana Shiva and co-author Maria Mies wrote Ecofeminism (Zed Books, 1993), in which they collaboratively rescued the term and the nascent movement from mysticism. A feminist conception of an alternative economy, writes Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Zed Books, 1986, 1998) 203

will include autarky and decentralization. But it will place the transformation of the existing sexual division of labor (based on the breadwinner-housewife model) at the centre of the whole restructuring process. This is not mere narcissistic self-indulgence of women, but the result of our historical research as well as our analysis of the functioning of capitalist patriarchy. Feminists do not start with the external ecology, economy and politics, but with social ecology, the centre of which is the relation between men and women. Autonomy over our bodies and lives is, therefore, the first and most fundamental demand of the international feminist movement. Any search for ecological, economic and political autarky must start with the respect for the autonomy of womens bodies, their productive capacity to create new life, their productive capacity to maintain life through work, their sexuality. A change in the existing sexual division of labour would imply first and foremost that the violence that characterizes capitalist-patriarchal man-woman relations worldwide will be abolished not by women, but by men. Men have to refuse to define themselves any longer as Man-the-Hunter. Men have to start movements against violence against women if they want to preserve the essence of their own humanity. (pp. 221-2) There is a lot to chew on in that paragraph. I want to focus on the question of violence, then, to briefly trace the parallel paths of male supremacy, dualism, and technocratic developmentalism. Many theorists, both pro-capitalist and Marxist, have pointed to the gravitational pull of productive forces, of the technology and relations of social production, and how these technologies and relations assert a determinative control on both the organization of society and the way we perceive and conceptualize our lives. What feminists have done is point out that our labor and lives are not only divided in the sphere of so-called public production, but even at a more basic level, at the level of our social ecology beneath and before public production, by a sexual division of labor, that then imbricates itself into our lives in every dimension -- intra-psychic, interpersonal, racial, national, and in our economic class relations. It is my contention that the reason the left and right have simultaneously floundered is their mutual devotion to technocratic developmentalism. It is further my contention that this ideology is both manifested and reproduced as dualism, as the alienation of the human being (presumed to be a male) from the environment, as the Managainst-Nature paradigm. This notion is naturalized because it is inscribed on our psyches, from a very early age, as part of our very (sexual) identity. Within this paradigm, which is both ideology and practice, masculine identity is fundamentally associated with violence -in our social relations, in our perception of nature, and in our very science. In Science, State, and Violence, an essay written by S. Ravi Rajan for Science as Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 117, September 2005), he outlines the association between violence and science, citing the repressive state measures taken in India by Indira Ghandis government on behalf of a modernization program. Consider some specific reference points, such as when tribal peoples enter into conflict with the modernist project. These are cases in which the 204

very assumptions and world views of the technocratic and pre-modern imaginaries collide. Cases in point are large dams that displace such peoples and threaten their ways of life. In most such instances in India, the conflict is more often than not resolved in favor of modern state technocracies, with the language and terms of reference of the latter. Even the legal establishments in democracies like India, as we have seen in court cases, privilege the language and epistemology of modernism over the ethnolanguages of these ostensibly refractory communities. We are pointing out that the project of democracy has thus far not been extended to include the aspirations and world views of pre-modern peoples, especially when they are seen as incommensurable. Violence, we therefore argue, is entrenched in styles of thinking that do not recognize the need for a plurality of world views, and often, of the validity of alternative knowledge systems. The modern imagination, which draws its very salience from science, is essentially a homogenizing enterprise, leveling diversity of all kinds. This process of homogenization began first in Europe and rapidly spread to other parts of the world. But for those on the receiving end it is fundamentally violent, and is so not only because of use or abuse but also due to the structural absence of a democratic mindset in modern science, especially when it comes to conflicting cultures of knowing and doing. Backwardness became part of the Marxist lexicon as part of the whole polemic between utopian socialism and scientific socialism at the same time that capitalist colonialism -- using the same terminology -- was in its heyday. Alongside this notion, as its polar opposite, was the construct, progress. People who happily refer to themselves as progressives really do need to understand the history and implications of this term. Progress as a concept is fundamentally connected, both in its meaning and history to science as what one writer called a totalitarian gestalt. In the origins and practice of science, as it was elaborated by Francis Bacon and politically conjured by Thomas Hobbs -- themselves the product of an imperial master-nation -- science was seen as a cheerfully violent enterprise, one of plundering natures secrets (the famous rape metaphor), of society as a war of all against all (a nascent form of social Darwinism), and of humanity as poles of inferior and superior. These hierarchical notions, out of which the unquestioned superiority of progress grew, were comparable and directly related to the taxonomies imposed on Nature by scient-ISTS. For the bourgeois philosophers and theorists that followed, the competitive predation of capitalism was a positive good. After all, they benefited from it; and power was synonymous with superiority. For the Marxists, who mounted the most significant challenge to bourgeois sciences mechanism in the 19th Century, the scientific examination of capitalism revealed irreconcilable class antagonisms that would be resolved, as they had throughout history, by a struggle between classes for social supremacy. One of the key contributions of Marxism to philosophy and politics was the notion of commodity fetishism that is, a direct challenge to the atomistic practice of science (and economics) that attended to the motion of various parts as if the universe was merely a vast billiard table. Hobbs actually claimed that tracing the movement of objects is sufficient to 205

explain everything there is to know about the universe. Marx pointed out that (1) the interactions or relations between the components of the universe not only change those things, but that the relation itself was a reality, and (2) that bourgeois science (and economics), by ignoring that, concealed the history of things and thereby the oppressive social relations that underwrote economic and political power. He said that bourgeois science had elements that were no less superstitious than the attachment to so-called primitive tokens, or fetishes. In this sense, Marx was the first complexity theorist. But Marx and his capitalist nemeses both agreed on one thing: the positive value of progress. Just as Marx had criticized the mechanistic materialists, like Hobbes, for fetishizing commodities (by treating them as if they had no social history behind them), Marx himself fetishized technology. So, unfortunately, did most of his followers thereafter. I am now going to quote one of the most (now) embarrassing passages in Marxs Capital (Volume III): the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases: thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must the civilized man, and he must do so in all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants, but at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized men, the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by is by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions favorable to, and worthy of their human nature. But it nonetheless remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy that is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. It is unlikely anyone will see that on the literature of any of the Marxists sects operating in the United States. The fact is, the majority of those active in Marxist organizations -- outside the leadership -- have never fully understood the implications of this Marxian concept of fetishism; and for them, that is probably a good thing. It leads directly, especially in light of what we know now about energy and its relation to technology, to a critique of technological development, not from the point of view of the relations of production, but of the instruments of production, i.e., technology itself. Marx said that (in Hornborgs words) commodities are rendered opaque by fetishism; they conceal significant aspects of social reality, while at the same time constituting that reality. They only pretend to emerge from the misty regions of religion fully formed, without a history. They are material objects of our own making over which we seem to have lost control. As with commodities, it is the alienated, socially decontextualized condition of the machine that renders it susceptible to fetishization. The 206

disembedded condition of the various artifacts of industrial technology has made it possible for people in the center of the system, such as David Ricardo [a bourgeois theorist] and, significantly, Karl Marx, to equip them [machines] with quite other signifieds, such as growth, progress, and development. (Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine - Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and the Environment, Altamira Press, 2001, p. 147) Hornborgs application of this key Marxian interpretation to identify one of Marxisms biggest blind spots is an important theoretical development. Throughout this book, which remains very important to me for many reasons, I kept reading the first time, having not long before discovered Mies book that had done a good feminist deconstruction of science, waiting to hear him make the connection. It was right there, in Bacons rape metaphor, in the Medieval constructs that were pulled into the Enlightenment and transformed -- Man, the bearer of Reason, obliged to subdue female and capricious (blind) Nature, obliged to plunder her secrets as the precondition of progress, obliged to play the authoritarian father to the feminized and infantilized colonies (themselves savage and untamed), and upon reaching the Enlightenment Utopia (herein, of Marxs classless communism) in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic. (The German Ideology, Marx & Engels) It is no accident that the same Marx who embraced the fetishism of technology (and its hierarchical development/progress myth) also separated public (waged) labor from the private (unwaged) labor of the wife (who is cooking and cleaning and doing laundry while he hunts, fishes, tends sheep, and engages in scholarly debates presumably she also fucks him when he takes a fancy, to complete his perfect days). It is also not simply coincidence that leftist movements who have, during key struggles, opened up spaces for women and given the nod to womens emancipation (which is to be accomplished by letting them work for wages, according to Marxism-theDoctrine), then pushed women back into largely traditional roles after acquiring political power. Masculinity constructed as conflict, as violence, has everything to do with the underlying dualism of the technological development paradigm, of ecological destruction, of colonization, of war, of capitalism (the infinite growth system), and of the continued lack of autonomy for women-as-a-class. Mies reference, the Man-the-Hunter meme, is important to confront. It is based on pure instrumental mythology developed by men who hunted as a sport and sign of privilege. It is, in a word, a lie. There is tremendous hope latent in the concern, now universal, about destruction of the biosphere. The environmental justice movement worldwide, as opposed to the imperial NGO environmentalism of wealthy metropolitans, is a movement that combines direct contact with the land and water, attention to distressed and oppressed people who 207

are seen as part of that environment, and a growing understanding of the carcinomic implications of growth based economics, a regionally-exploitative word system, and the global energy crisis -- to include the Energy War. While there is no clear understanding in the television-conformed American metropole of the catastrophic future of the unprepared suburbs of car-culture with the reality of peak oil, the vast majority of the worlds population, including wide sections of US society, are always preoccupied with food. Even before the consequences of the Energy War arrive to roost on the white, suburban American consumer who has vested all hope in reactionary politicians, and creates the political crisis that pivots American society on a new and still unknown political path, the issue of food in inescapable. No matter how pathological its instantiations, with GMO French fries and nitrate-laced, factory meat, food remains a constant, and as well a constant preoccupation of all human beings. It may be the politics of food that has the greatest capacity for self-organization -- more than resistance to surveillance, resistance to oppression, and struggles for better wages or health care. Nothing connects everything like food. The very thing that keeps us all locked into the system on a day-to-day basis, that pulls us into accepting our alienation and humiliation at the hands of bosses, bosses everywhere is the fear that we will go without shelter and food. That is why food security is anathema to establishment power. We might be able to measure the popular legitimacy of any political establishment by this yardstick what is its level of commitment to or opposition to food security? Feminism, the political movement for womens autonomy (not for some abstract equality within the very categories established by millennia of patriarchy), is an essential component of any political struggle that takes the integrity of the human body as its point of departure. More than that, however, feminism is the precondition of any lasting social transformation, because patriarchy as both the political and metaphorical model for all relations of domination is the most long standing, persistent, and intractable cultural form of oppressive power. There is no doubt that the form of patriarchy as it currently exists is interwoven with capital accumulation and racial-national colonization. But the durability (and intractability) of any social system correlates to the depth and strength of its internalization into the psyches of the individual members of society. This is the basis of hegemony as opposed to direct coercion, and therefore the basis of the stability of any system. As Steve Biko said, The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. There is no ideology that is experienced with the same personal and emotional force, that is perceived more like a law of nature, that is imprinted earlier or with more relentlessness during the socialization of individual human beings, than gender and in the actually-existing world, that means male and female as masculinity and femininity, in a hierarchical relation. Appeals to masculine privilege and virtue have been part of every social movement, as well as part of every counter-revolution. When the liberal trope of progress and (abstract) equality was pushed under the noses of Progressives, by women who intuited that they had been left out of the deal, and who were thereby sensitized to the hypocrisy of these Progressives, progressiv-ism (latter-day liberalism) was forced to respond to the challenge of ever-more mobilized women. This was true in the capitalist world system; and it was true in the socialist states, that never succeeded in escaping this world system. The roots of sexual identity, however, of male power and privilege, were so deeply inscribed on the psyches of the plants men, that the reaction against women seeking higher levels of autonomy was always there in the psyches of men like a dormant virus waiting to be activated. And so, as political instabilities emerged, 208

the response, fueled by the deeply affective attachment to patriarchy and by the ideology of gender as a hierarchical system, was reactionary. This applied to the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the right-wing ascendancy in the United States, to the Taliban, and as a central idea in the Hindutva movement. Both liberalism and socialism failed, on no small account, because the former was incapable and the latter unwilling to surrender male power, and to begin uprooting patriarchy itself, root and branch. Patriarchy is the primary contradiction, if we have to state it thus at all. The connection between food security and feminism is that both begin and end with the human being as a physical body. If history has shown us anything, it is that the departure from this as our fundamental point of reference always ends with outrage and catastrophe. I dont know if the archeology of gender will show that mens productive relation to the earth through tools and womens ability to produce life out of their own bodies was at some juncture what led to masculinity being defined as contempt for the body. That seems like an academic discussion, albeit an important one, right now. The equation of contempt for the body with masculinity is demonstrable, however, from the records of history and from the experience of our daily lives. The same disregard for the body that is valorized in the death-cults of men (like the military) is translated into the desire to dominate and defile the shameful and forbidden bodies of women. Nancy C. M. Hartsock writes (Money, Sex, and Power, Northeastern University Press, 1985): Loathing for the body, in the sense that bodily needs and desires are humiliating, appears in pornography in the form of the contrast between the mans self-control and the womans frenzied abandon. It is consistently a woman who is humiliated by her desire, her helplessness, and her materiality. The theme of succeeding by ignoring/overcoming the feelings of the body [a consistent theme during military training courses SG] is related to the fear and loathing of the body. (p.173) The contradictory relation that women have to food in the current order, especially in the over-developed metropoles, has confused and obscured the essential relation between womens autonomy and food security. Food is no longer seen as an integrated, but as an alienated, aspect of survival. It is a commodity, to be gained within the logic of the socially Darwinist milieu of growth economics. The male role of breadwinner tells us plenty, and it has not infrequently been placed at the center of labor struggles that saw the male as the (public) wage laborer and the female as the domestic servant of the male. The value of the male and the security of his gender identity is deeply and even emotionally bound up with this bread-winner role. Once food production was appropriated away from the household and community, once the private-public dichotomy became a social reality, and the latter was devalued (and the women left there with it), women began to lose social power. Penny Van Esterik, who advocates a feminist food-praxis, observes (Engendering the Food System - Gender and Sustainable Food Systems: A Feminist Critique, 1999):

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Some Western feminists see food as relevant only to the domestic sphere of social reproduction. They place a higher priority on redressing the imbalance of power in the sexual division of labour (having men take on more responsibility for cooking, feeding, and nurturing) and on more fully accounting for womens labour in food production. Latin American womens groups have successfully established collective kitchens, but some feminists have been critical of these womens self-help organizations because they focus almost exclusively on traditional womens tasks and do not challenge the traditional division of labour. Breaking down oppositional thinking is an important part of feminist theoretical reorientation. It opens the door to reintegrating everyday practice and objective scientific knowledge. Cooking as thoughtful practice blends theory and practice, body and mind; it reflects the way many women experience food -- not as nutrients, but as nurture. The study of food and eating has been marginalized because of Western binary logic, which favours mind over body, theory over practice, abstract over concrete, object over subject, public over private, and reason over emotion, among others. Women are both vulnerable and powerful -- victimized and empowered -- through food. Feminist nondualistic thinking about food reminds us that ethnocentric oppositions such as production and reproduction, public and private, and self and other are a Western legacy of blinkered, binary thinking. Food practices confound the dichotomy between production and reproduction and between public and private and are part of both the formal and the informal economy (both . . . and, not either . . . or). The special case of breast-feeding makes this clearer. Womens bodies are simultaneously a means of production and a means of reproduction -- producing babies and breast milk. This is both productive and reproductive work and is both a public and a private act. Other food practices confound the dichotomies between production and reproduction and between public and private. The task of preparing meals cannot be reduced to a private act of social reproduction when the food may have involved substantial bartering and exchange in the public sector, be redistributed in community potluck dinners, and be exchanged as leftovers with neighbours. Are these public or private acts? Eating and cooking break down these oppositions. Feminist food praxis thus requires an examination of womens power in relation to the food system, says Van Esterik. For this to happen, however, the philosophical and ideological assumptions -- all deeply gendered, as I will show -- that support the global food system (of which organized labor, et al, are only a part) have to be effectively challenged. A womens movement, not solely people by women, but consistently focused on the gender system as its target, and identified with the autonomy of women, has to reappear on the political scene. This is not merely a question of urban survivalism, which has recognized the value of permaculture and other localized food security strategies. It will be important, as a means of withdrawing from our own dependency on the growth grid, those of us in 210

urban and suburban metropolitan communities, to begin growing our own food. But there s a mammoth political struggle waiting in the wings. Monsanto and Archer-DanielMidland are not going to roll over while societies organize a de facto boycott of agri-biz. Agri-business, the most heavily subsidized and politically powerful economic sector in the United States (outside of weapons production), is waging international war on food security as a way of monopolizing profits from food insecurity. They have used intellectual property rights to lay claim to actual living species of human food. Vandana Shiva, in a statement to the International Conference on Women in Agriculture said, Instead of falsely labelling the patriarchal projects of intellectual property rights on seed and genetic engineering in agriculture which are destroying biodiversity and the small farmers of the Third World as partnership with Third World women, it would be more fruitful to redirect agricultural policy towards women centred systems which promote biodiversity based small farm agriculture. A common myth used by Monsanto and the Biotechnology industry is that without genetic engineering, the world cannot be fed. However, while biotechnology is projected as increasing food production four times, small ecological farms have productivity hundreds of time higher than large industrial farms based on conventional farms. Women farmers in the Third World are predominantly small farmers. They provide the basis of food security, and they provide food security in partnership with other species. The partnership between women and biodiversity has kept the world fed through history, at present, and will feed the world in the future. It is this partnership that needs to be preserved and promoted to ensure food security. Agriculture based on diversity, decentralisation and improving small farm productivity through ecological methods is a women-centred, nature friendly agriculture. In this women-centred agriculture, knowledge is shared, other species and plants are kin, not property, and sustainability is based on renewal of the earth's fertility and renewal and regeneration of biodiversity and species richness on farms to provide internal inputs. In our paradigms, there is no place for monocultures of genetically engineered crops and IPR [intellectual property rights] monopolies on seeds. Monocultures and monopolies symbolise a masculinsation of agriculture. The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names given to herbicides which destroy the economic basis of the survival of the poorest women in the rural areas of the Third World. Monsanto's herbicides are called "Round up", "Machete", "Lasso" American Home Products which has merged with Monsanto calls its herbicides `Pentagon', `Prowl', `Scepter', `Squadron', `Cadre', `Lightening', `Assert', `Avenge'. This is the language of war, not sustainability. There can be no doubt that these corporate behemoths will attempt to outlaw, using biopiracy and patent law, among other tactics, any coordinated, widespread attempt, even and especially within the US, to establish autonomous and sustainable food security 211

systems, based on urban-suburban food production, local farmers markets, community gardens, and other localizing methods. Hermit tactics and de facto secessionism will not work. This system of food production forcibly removed millions of people from their land before, and it will not idly stand by and watch the kind of challenge mounted by something as fundamentally subversive as feminist food praxis take form and prosper. Because it could prosper. The American middle class -- now ignorant, alienated, indoctrinated, and utterly dependent -- doesnt know it yet, but with the right collective strategy, it could largely pull itself off the growth grid in ten years if it were willing to politically defend itself at every step along the way. This notion is deeply and dangerously political. But our disciplinary borders still keep us in separate boxes, says Van Esterik defined by these same oppositions. The medical and the gastronomic are separated -- cure and cuisine are separated -- and this division further separates the professional expert from the layperson, usually the laywoman. Cooking and eating, feeding the self, and feeding others concern metaphor, pattern, and system and call for an epistemology of relationships between people and between people and their food, not an epistemology of cause and effect. Lineal causality is inappropriate to the world of living organisms, which adapt, relate, and learn, rather than reacting to laws. Mechanistic metaphors fail to effectively explain relationships, holism, or synergy. Cooking, feeding, and eating are metaphors for interdependence, nurture, mutual support, and pleasure in a world full of metaphors for independence, greed, ambition, and pain. Terms like nurture, reciprocity, and intimacy have no meaning without context, but they require a paradigm shift in thinking. That paradigm shift is feminism. There is no analytical standpoint that deconstructs the ideology of science and developmentalism, of growth, and of the radical(ly wrong) technological optimism shared -- in many cases -- from right to left along the ideological spectrum. It is the only intellectual tradition that has the perspective and the depth to understand the pernicious myth of objectivity at the center of the penetrative sciences, the dualism of Man vs. Nature, and the sanctity of Conquest, as having their roots in the historic soil of gender, nurtured from the seed of gender, and sustained on the precipitation of gender. The trope of Conquest that is in the very heart of science as an elite, subdivided vocation is what makes science -- from its very inception. This is why we can say that it is violent all the way down to the molecular level; and how we can connect the practice of science as the conquest of nature (the most absurd venture in human history), with the conquest of colonies and subject-nations, and the conquest of women (the forerunner of them all). In the struggle to overcome our suicidal trajectory, the dissolution of Conquest, we shall have to reclaim our autonomy -- as the social beings that we irrevocably are -- and this can only start with the restoration of the autonomy of women, and the bodies of living human beings -- where all experience, suffering or joy, mediates between that humanity and the universe of which it is a part -- as our first and last point of reference.

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Training the White Nation (Originally published in two differing editions at Sanders Research Associates and Truthdig, 2006. There was nothing more inflammatory in my first book, about the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, than my assertion that Special Operations was a hotbed of racism and reaction. Hideous Dream - A Soldiers Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000) was my personal account of that operation; and I was explicit not only about the significant number of white supremacists in Special Operations, but how the attitudes of these extremists connected with the less explicit white male supremacy of white patriarchal American society and defined, in some respects, the attitude taken by US occupation forces in Haiti toward the Haitian population. The resistance to this allegation was particularly fierce, and not merely from those inside the Special Operations community, whose outrage was more public relations stagecraft than anything else. There was outrage from people who hadnt a moment of actual experience in the military at all. This is an affront to something sacred in the public imaginary of a thoroughly militarized United States: that we are an international beacon of civilized virtue, and that our military is the masculine epitome of that virtue standing between our suburban security and the dark chaos of the Outside. Questioning the mystique of the armed forces is tantamount to lunacy at best and treason at worst. This is the reason bad-apple-ism has been the predominant meme of the media and the Pentagon when they are compelled to discuss the stories of torture, rape, and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few bad apples committed torture. A few bad apples raped prisoners, fellow female soldiers, and civilians in their homes. The massacre was not descriptive of the Marine Corps, but the work of a few bad apples. Anyone who wants to be the skunk at this prevarication party need only ask, How do these bad apples all seem to aggregate into the same units? One bad apple was dispensed with on June 11, 2001. Thats when Timothy McVeigh was given a lethal injection at 7 AM in the death chamber of the US Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana. Frugivorous analogies aside, McVeigh was not the product of a tree or poor storage, but of a culture. Raised in Western New York by a devoutly Catholic father -- an auto worker -- after his parents divorced when he was ten, Tim McVeigh, like many other white youth who are socially awkward and living in times of economic insecurity, was already reading survivalist and white nationalist literature in his teens. The mythopatriarchal absolutism of racial ideology mapped perfectly onto the consciousness of someone raised by a religiously devout male, and the fact that this ideology responded directly to the insecurities of economic and gender destabilization secured McVeigh as an early devotee. Gore Vidal said that McVeigh needed a self-consuming cause to define him. Vidals account, The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh, ominously printed in Vanity Fair just days before the 9-11 attacks expressed another self-consuming cause, noted that McVeigh took his cues from the very government he had worked for as a soldier. Before McVeighs attack in Oklahoma City, the most recent attack by Americans against Americans outside of warfare was the FBI-BATF massacre of an obscure religious commune that was demonized for destruction at Waco, Texas -- which McVeigh 213

memorialized by blowing up the Murrah Building on the Waco massacres second anniversary. When McVeigh was interviewed about the collateral damage in Oklahoma, he was asked if he felt remorse. He replied that Truman had never apologized for Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And the formative moment in Iraq for Tim McVeigh was the order by Major General Barry McCaffrey -- the sociopath appointed by Bill Clinton to be the nations drug tsar -- to slaughter a seven-mile line of retreating Iraqi soldiers and civilians after the ceasefire in Iraq now called the Turkey Shoot. As the old military motto says, Trained by the best, kill like the rest. Much has been made of McVeighs affinity for The Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi novel about a white nationalist guerrilla war in the US, written under pseudonym by the late William Pierce. Less often noted was another formative cultural product for McVey, Red Dawn, a silly film about American teenagers organizing an armed resistance to the Soviet occupation of the United States. While silly is a descriptive term for both these cultural products, we cannot assume they are irrelevant. With the increasingly sophisticated and penetrative mass media, and the consolidation of that media into a handful of multinational corporations, the production of mass consciousness has become qualitatively different, more generally conforming, and has inaugurated a new reality reflected imprecisely by academic postmodernism: the narrative now has more power than ever to create a reality in its own image. Production, however, is not explicitly ideological. It is driven by competition for market share, and entertainment is the commodity a kind of bread and circuses default that prefigures a more general breakdown of authentic community. The President himself is costumed as a cowboy or a fighter pilot, as we enter a postmodern era where life imitates art, and politics imitates cheap cinematic conventions. Actors and wrestlers become Presidents and Governors. News personalities in pancake makeup pander to niche markets of misdirected outrage. The alienated subject is now pacified, addictive, over-stimulated; and this market dynamic leads to stimulation-one-upmanship as the threshold of shock and excitement among the masses rises. The cultural product must be mapped onto a pre-existing social imaginary, and so we are treated to a cocktail of frontier masculinity, the fear of barbarians outside the gate, and militarized revenge fantasies. (The owners and producers are almost all men, after al, and standpoint matters.) On April 19, 1995, a fan of these martial male fantasies detonated 7,000 pounds of explosives under a Federal office building and killed 168 human beings, in what he described as a defense of the Constitution of the United States. Before we judge this claim too harshly, we should take note that this defense of the Constitution is the core of the oath taken by every US military member who is now serving in the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the oath I took that led me to burn down the houses of Vietnamese, and the oath taken by Captain Medina and Lieutenant Calley before they ordered the massacre in My Lai, where the body count was three times that of Timothy McVeigh. Its magic, this defense of a sacralized political document; it changes forms. And white male supremacy (we always leave out that second modifier, though it is just as consistently true as the first) is not simple; therefore it cannot be simply dismissed. The reason I being this up at all, this old news of white male terrorism in the US, is not purely academic. The US military is allowing avowed white supremacists back in now 214

after an alleged hiatus one begun in response to the discovery of Timothy McVeighs ideological orientations, and the murder of a Black couple in December that same year by neo-Nazis in the 82nd Airborne Division. John Kifner, writing for the New York Times on July 7th, notes: A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC], which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines. We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad, the group quoted a Defense Department investigator This, of course, is remarkable for its abnormality or so some might have us think. These explicitly white supremacist groups, contrasted with the implicitly white supremacist Republican Party, for example, openly embrace a vision of fascism, and openly admire fascist leaders. And while I take issue with those who throw the F-word around as a mere epithet stripped of any operational meaning, the alarm sounded by the SPLC about fascists joining the military with less than perfect oversight to prevent their entry raises some very interesting issues about our entire political conjuncture. I believe the case can be made that these young men joining the military, embodying a racial-purity version of military masculinity, are anything except ab-normal. They are hyper-normal. A norm, after all, is defined as a standard or model or pattern regarded as typical. We need to first see for how long white supremacy has been considered ab-normal in the United States, then see how abnormal it is right now, and only then begin to focus more tightly on the question of fascism and fascists joining the military. Skin color is routinely linked to the question of white supremacy, often seen as a kind of psychological disorder and not a social system, or at worst a social system that erupts from a pernicious ideology, with no real material basis. What is seldom examined in public discourse outside the universities and a handful of anti-racist political formations, is the question of what it means to be white. Thinkers from Toni Morrison to Noel Ignatiev to bell hooks to Theodore Allen to Mab Segrest to David Roediger have studied whiteness extensively, in its economic, cultural, and political dimensions, and conclude unanimously that there is no objective measure for what it means; but that it is a social construction linked absolutely to social power. The insistence on existence of a white race, by racists and non-racists alike, is symptomatic of a form of mystification that conceals the concrete relations of power behind a set of widely accepted abstractions. White supremacy as a belief has evolved out of the practice of people in power, who defined themselves as white as a way of differentiating themselves from those over whom they wielded that power. Some very well-known American presidents who made openly white supremacist pronouncements were Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Of course, until the dismantling of Jim Crow in the South, white supremacy was a norm, and before the Civil War, slavery was a norm. 215

White supremacy was normal enough in 1964, that after the defeat of Goldwater, the Republican Party adopted thinly-veiled racist appeals to attract white voters who felt betrayed by the reluctant Democratic Party support for Civil Rights legislation. Openly racist public officials like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott, even after their affiliations with white supremacist organizations were publicized, continued to be elected. The Republican appeals to white supremacy were cloaked as opposition to welfare, states rights, and concern about crime. As late as 1999. the Republican controlled House of Representatives blocked a vote to condemn the Conservative Citizens Councils, a white supremacist organization with whom Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had close ties. How normed does something have to be before we can say it is normal? Denial supports this non-racist racism. A poll by the Washington Post in 2001 showed that half of all white people believe Blacks in the US are just as economically welloff and secure as whites. But economic and social distance between blacks and whites is far from closed, except in the minds of many white Americans. Six in 10 whites -- 61 percent -- say the average black has equal or better access to health care than the average white, according to the poll. In fact, blacks are far more likely to be without health insurance than whites. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureaus Current Population Survey found that blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to be without health insurance. The survey found that half of all whites -- 49 percent -- believe that blacks and whites have similar levels of education, a perception that again is out of step with reality. About one in six blacks -- 17 percent -- have completed college, compared with 28 percent of all whites. And 88 percent of all whites are high school graduates, compared with 79 percent of all blacks 25 years old or older. Im surprised at those numbers; I thought everybody was the same these days, said Jeffrey Thomas, 42, an ironworker who lives in Salem, Ore. Thomas said his views on African Americans were based largely on the blacks that he knows and those he sees in his community. I have black friends, and my son's friend is black, and everybody's in the same boat around here in Salem, he said. Maybe if you went to Portland, things would be different. Half of all whites -- 50 percent -- say that the average black is about as well off as the average white in terms of the jobs they hold, according to the Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey. Again, the hard data are less positive: A third of all whites hold professional or managerial jobs, compared to slightly more than one-fifth of all blacks, according to census data. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites -- 23 versus 12 percent -- to hold lower-paying, less prestigious service jobs. Blacks also are more than twice as likely to be unemployed; in May, the jobless rate for blacks stood at 8 percent, compared with 3.8 percent among whites.

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Those figures are probably correct, said Brian Clayton, 35, director of information technology for a law firm in Dayton, Ohio. But what were they 10 years ago? Twenty years ago? I think we're moving in the right direction. You shouldn't just make a black a manager because he's black. It's going to take more time. The poll found that a majority of whites -- 57 percent -- recognize that blacks on average earn less than whites. Still, four in 10 whites -- 42 percent -- believed incorrectly that the typical black earned as much or more than the typical white. In fact, substantial differences persist between black and white earnings. The median household income for whites was $44,366 in 1999, compared with $27,910 for blacks. Fewer than three in 10 whites earn less than $25,000; nearly half of all blacks in 1999 earned less than that. And the poverty rate for African Americans is more than double the white rate. Blacks were twice as likely to have reported having difficulties recently paying their rent or mortgage and about half as likely as whites to have money invested in stocks, bonds or mutual funds, according to the Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll. Another way to look at the extent of these misperceptions is to see what proportion of whites holds at least one false belief about black circumstances. When analyzed together, seven in 10 whites hold at least one of these misperceptions, and a majority -- 56 percent -- held two or more. Three in 10 whites -- 31 percent -- believe that the average black fared as well or better than whites in each of the four areas tested. Racial attitudes are constructed around existing material advantage. This is not nearly as newsworthy as a Klan rally. It is far more important, though, as a causative agent for our social antagonisms. And there is an element of white supremacy in the mainstream discourse about the Iraq war, for example. Both liberals and conservatives articulate the notion that the US has to stay in Iraq to prevent a catastrophe. There is no account here for the demonstrable fact (with rudimentary research) that the US presence is the most determinative force behind the social catastrophe there; moreover, there is no recognition of the orientalism (a white supremacist meme) that assumes the superiority of western tutelage and the deviance (violent irrationality) of Arabs and-or Muslims. Privilege naturalizes itself. It portrays itself as an outcome of nature; and we all know that the laws of nature remain out of critical reach. Alas, thats just how it is what a pity. Fascism traditionally employs either a master-race or master-culture narrative. This narrative is reinforced for troops on the ground in Iraq by the circumstances. The role of occupier is the role of dominator, and as the Stanford Prison Experiment proved dramatically, this dominator role very quickly translates into the dehumanization and objectification of the dominated. On the ground, at the infantry level, wars of domination in every instance become race wars. The dust-up recently about a Marine signing a song (which was published on the internet as a video), called Hadji Girl, in which he humorously describes killing Iraqi children to the raucous applause of his fellow Marines, was hardly a blip in the corporate media.

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In American society right now, with the immigration hysteria fuelled by fauxpopulists like CNNs execrable Lou Dobbs, there is a growing upwave of xenophobia that has begun to legitimate vigilantism, like that of the Arizona Minutemen (supported even by the Governor of California); and vigilantism is always a feature of fascism in periods before it decisively achieves state power. The lines between the comic-opera militias parked along the Arizona border, the libertarian militias in the Midwest, and the Aryan militias in the Idaho foothills are not terribly clear. Timothy McVeigh could have just as easily related to all of them. The social currents of racial/cultural supremacy are there. The vigilantism is forming. So two aspects of fascism are already falling into place. Another aspect, and one that was formative of Timothy McVeigh is economic destabilization. Fascism can be described as a middle class phenomenon. One can look at the emergence of the three most studied fascist governments, Mussolinis Italy, Francos Spain, and Hitlers Germany, and in every case there was a privileged stratum of the working class that had been the beneficiaries of metropolitan capitalist development (courtesy of peripheral colonies) that rubbed shoulders socially with the professional and managerial sectors. In times of instability, friction develops between fractions of this stratum. Insecurity among the lower middle-classes creates anxiety and anger that can easily be directed by populist-sounding demagogues (Mussolini and Hitler actually claimed to be socialist, even as they strengthened the ruling classes in their own societies during militarization). Those just above these fractious masses are caught between their anxiety at the turbulent resentments of the lower stratum and their fear that they themselves are only a paycheck away from joining them. Leftist scholars have documented and explained this class dimension of fascism at some length. Columbia Universitys contribution to Answers-dot-com section on fascism notes: While socialism (particularly Marxism) came into existence as a clearly formulated theory or program based on a specific interpretation of history, fascism introduced no systematic exposition of its ideology or purpose other than a negative reaction against socialist and democratic egalitarianism. The growth of democratic ideology and popular participation in politics in the 19th cent. was terrifying to some conservative elements in European society, and fascism grew out of the attempt to counter it by forming mass parties based largely on the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, exploiting their fear of political domination by the lower classes. [In the American South, this dread was aimed at Blacks, and the bogeyman of Black-rule was repeatedly invoked, along with the Black sexual satyr, to fuel anti-Black pograms. -SG] Forerunners of fascism, such as Georges Boulanger in France and Adolf Stker and Karl Lueger in Germany and Austria, in their efforts to gain political power played on people's fears of revolution with its subsequent chaos, anarchy, and general insecurity. They appealed to nationalist sentiments and prejudices, exploited anti-Semitism, and portrayed themselves as champions of law, order, Christian morality, and the sanctity of private property. In each of the European cases, the trigger bringing fascist demagogues to power was a profound economic crisis. This is a tendency buried within an ever-expanding 218

regime of capital accumulation, because the logic of capital inevitably comes into conflict with the territorial logic of power (David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford Press, 2003). The mobility of capital eventually liquidates or abandons all spaces, including living space, and this throws middle-classes into both economic and psychological disorder. They can break both ways: embracing a progressive path of going through to the other side of the crisis by creating new social models, or embracing the (often idealized and mythical) past. Giovanni Arrighi, writing in Hegemony Unravelling (New Left Review, Mar-Apr 2005) made the point that [a]s Karl Polanyi pointed out long ago, with special reference to the overaccumulation crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, devastations of this kind inevitably call forth the self-protection of society in both progressive and reactionary political form That hasnt happened in the US yet. The anxiety has been building, along with an increasingly precarious social existence in the burbs, where car-infrastructure is running into record oil prices, pension funds are being wiped out in strategic bankruptcies, and the household debt overhang is beginning to resemble a plank suspended over a canyon with a couple of nails. Not coincidentally, militarization has been one of the processes that has postponed the inevitable. The militarization of American society has gone on for some time (ever since World War II to be exact), but this militarization -- an aspect of fascism as well -- has taken on a different character since the Bush administration lucked into 9-11. Aside from the Straussian convictions about mythopoetic perception management (using cheap cinematic conventions), the practical result of the neo-con core advisor group around this decayingdynastic White House has been the accelerated militarization of economic, domestic, and foreign policy. Perception management, after all, including cynical constructions of the nation as the bulwark of good against evil, has been in the armamentarium of most governments. The American economy has been using the military contracting system during decades of deindustrialization (moving offshore to exploit cheap labor) to create a surrogate export market for key industries. The military has also long been used as a research and development subsidy vehicle for private corporations. What the Bush administration has done that is unique is to prioritize unilateral military action in foreign policy at the expense of diplomatic maneuvering and consensus-building among the core capitalist metropoles, and to centralize population control measures at home under a more militarized system though the militarization of police forces with tactical units has been in progress for decades and the Clinton administration paved the way for the exponential expansion of the domestic prison population. Another unique feature of the Bush administrations militarization program has been the private contracting of military and paramilitary operations to an alphabet soup of corporations, some led by ruling caste veterans like Bill Perry and many led by the sketchiset characters crawling out of the rank and file of the military itself. In Iraq, mercenaries are now the third largest armed contingent on the ground, behind only the American armed forces and the Kurdish peshmerga. There are roughly 25,000 of these contractors working in Iraq and they are completely immune from any law. Last year, after a homemade video escaped (a la Hadji Girl these folks seem to be proud of themselves) showing so-called security contractors in an SUV driving down an Iraqi highway with Elvis music blasting as they shot cars off the road for sport, the blogs 219

began distributing it. In December, the Washington Post finally ran a story on it. Only then did the military even comment on the video, which they said they would investigate. Nothing has come of this alleged investigation. What did surface, however, once the media decided it was worth a closer look, is that this kind of colonial impunity is routinely exercised by contractors, who are little more than extremely high-paid thugs, is not covered by either Iraqi law or the US Uniform Code of Military Justice. Because the salaries of these contractors are routinely above $100,000 a year, with all expenses paid on site, the military itself, especially Special Operations, has had to steeply increase reenlistment bonuses (some as high as $150,000 in a single lump sum) to partially stem the exodus of Special Ops troops into the lucrative world of corporate mercenaries. This is a world unto itself, a culture obsessed with death, firearms, and racial-purity doctrines. One need only page through the periodicals of this sub-culture, the most widely circulated being Soldier of Fortune magazine, to find these preoccupations between the articles and ads like a toxic salad. The glue holding them together is gun-culture. Gunculture is not an obscure fringe, but a very mainstream, widely popular sub-culture, that taps directly into another key component of fascism: martial masculinity. Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin, writing in American Imago in 1995 (In the Aftermath of Nazi Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and Psychoanlaysis -- Legend and Legacy): The crucial element of fascism is its explicit sexual language, what Theweleit calls the conscious coding or the over-explicitness of the fascist language of symbol. This fascist symbolization creates a particular kind of psychic economy which places sexuality in the service of destruction. Despite its sexually charged politics, fascism is an anti-eros, the core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure He shows that in this world of war the repudiation of ones own body, of femininity, becomes a psychic compulsion which associates masculinity with hardness, destruction, and self-denial. Men who are threatened by womens decreased dependency and increased organization often adopt an individual strategy of overconformity, compulsively acquiring masculine accoutrements, be they giant automobiles, guns, or attack-breed dogs, and just as compulsively behave as if they are trying out for a role with the World Wrestling Foundation affecting a kind of bright-eyed homicidal aggression because they equate fear with respect. Divisions of male labor and divisions of female labor respond to changes in the economic and political terrain. Look at the more respectable masculinity that prioritizes responsibility to the family which keeps men who are not in the ruling class working. Compare that to the fascistic masculinity displayed by the masculine over-conformers (described above), which merges easily with the idealization of military masculinity in times when warfare plays a more central role in society for example, during crises of (economic & social) destabilization. War becomes necessary to rescue the nation. Gun culture is permeated with this thought, including its sense of embattlement, and its embrace

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of mythical frontier masculinity that sacrifices comfort to overcome dark forces from the Outside. Economic destabilization is extremely disruptive of conventional masculinities that equate the male role with that of a provider; and create the conditions for overcompensation in the form of hyper-normal male identity as an armed actor. The rise of fascistic masculinity prefigures systemic fascism, often in the form of vigilantism. Gun culture is steeped in vigilantism, which is steeped in military lore. Guns in this milieu transcend their practical uses and take on a powerful symbolic significance. In the last decade, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has always had close ties with the military, has been taken over from what are considered within the organization as moderates, that is, those whose message emphasizes peaceful, lawabiding gun use, like hunting (which is not peaceful for the game animals, but thats another issue). The NRA Board of Directors has increasingly consisted of people with an explicit right-wing and vigilante orientation. John Milius is among them, the filmmaker who made Red Dawn, Timothy McVeighs damascene film experience, and Conan the Barbarian, starring the now-Governor of California, who endorsed the Arizona Minutemen. So is the aforementioned Jeff Cooper, pistol-trainer for the original Delta Force, who calls himself a libertarian and has devoted his life to telling people how to survive in a gunfight and who suggested that inner-cities (read: Black neighborhoods) should be supplied with ammunition to keep the homicide rates high. He refers to Africans as orangutans and Japanese as Nips. Research Director Paul Blackman once commented, In fact, studies of homicide victims -- especially the increasing number of younger ones -- suggest they are frequently criminals themselves and/or drug addicts or users. It is quite possible that their deaths are net gains. Then there is ex-rocker Ted Nugent who said of Black South Africans, They still put bones in their noses. They walk around naked and wipe their butts with their hands You give em toothpaste and they fuckin eat it. And of Hillary Clinton, he said she is a toxic cunt a two-bit whore for Fidel Castro. The weird Wyoming Representative Barbara Cubin is also on the board. She once described her sons as blonde-haired and blue-eyed, then went on to suggest that Black people are generally drug addicts and should not be able to buy firearms. Representative Mel Watt objected, and Representative Cubin replied, I would like to apologize to my colleague for his sensitivities. Quite a number of ultra-conservative Congress-people have served on the 75-member board. Everyone knows the actor Charleston Heston. But many havent heard the quote form an NRA speech, where he proclaimed, Mainstream America is counting on you to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time and resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it is a divine duty to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while seek preference with the other. Other board alumni include anti-immigrant militia advocate Wayne Stump, California militiaman T. J. Johnson, Illinois militiaman Leroy Pyle, Soldier of Fortunes publisher Robert Brown, and Illinois Militiaman Leroy Pyle. Pyle said of Sarah Brady, whose husband was paralyzed by gunfire, That ugly cackler. She pulls her husband around like a pulltoy on a string. My friends and I say that if that ever happened to one of us and our wife did that, somebody would slip into the house 221

one night and slit her throat. But Pyle also has other connections. He was the systems operator in 1992 of the internet-based Paul Revere Network, that carried articles from The Resister. The Resister was an underground right-wing newspaper published in Fort Brag within Special Forces. Mastheaded with a coiled rattlesnake, The Resister subtitled itself as The Political Warfare Journal of the Special Forces Underground. (SFU) It was founded by ex-Special Forces operator Steven Barry, whose story was covered extensively in Soldier of Fortune. Quotes for editions of The Resister include: Personally, I am sick and tired of listening to Jews whine and kvetch about their Holocaust, and when I am afflicted by it my reaction ranges, depending upon how much tolerance I was graced with that day, from studied indifference to remarking that, if killing Jews was the Germans' aim for locking them up they were uncharacteristically inefficient about the whole thing and criminally wasteful with precious logistics in time of war, because all the Germans had to do was lock the Pests in efficiently dehumidified and comfortably heated barracks for five days unfed and let them die of thirst. and Surgeon General David Satcher, the second Bell Curve proof that Negroes must never be permitted to practice medicine on Whites, recently declared that Negro propensity for puerile and violent behavior is, according to the Jewish operated Associated Press, one of the leading health indicators -- that address a broad range of health and, one might argue, social concerns. (Emphasis added.) No kidding. We are discouraged from pondering why America needs a Surgeon General (who neither practices surgery nor is a general) in the first place, let alone why every Surgeon General appointed during this administration has been a Negro. However, I know why. It is because our government really does hate us. During my own service with 3rd Special Forces Group in Haiti in 1994, members of the SFU initiated back-channel communications in support of the right-wing death squad network, FRAPH. Two of Barrys and SFUs and Soldier of Fortunes and the NRAs favored preoccupations were Ruby Ridge, where Vicki Harris, the wife of an ex-Special Forces white supremacist (Randy Weaver) was killed by an FBI sniper with her baby still in her arms, and the outrage at Waco against the Branch Davidians. Let me say here, for the record, the FBI actions in both these cases was criminal and inexcusable, and largely provoked by the FBI itself. But the fact that Weaver was one of the neo-fascists own, and that Koresh and his acolytes were white, combined with the stunning abuse of power by the Federal Government in both cases, turned these two cases into a twin-cause celebre for the militia-right. I will also note that I own firearms; I have no problem with others owning them; and I think much liberal opposition to firearms is stupid, moralistic, and drives many people into the arms of the lunatic right. I am an advocate of the right to self-defense. My critique of gun culture is a critique of those sectors for whom guns have been combined with imaginary enemies and taken on a deeply 222

symbolic value as tokens of a violent, reactionary masculinity that fantasizes about armed conflict as a means to actualize its paranoid male sexual identity. The problem is that this reaction is far from ab-normal. There is a kind of interlocking directorate between white nationalists, gun culture, right-wing politicians, mercenary culture (like SOF), vigilante and militia movements, and elements within both Special Forces and -- now -- the privatized mercenary forces. It is hyper-masculine, racialist, militaristic, and networked. If one simply pays attention to cultural production in the United States, especially film and video games, it is fairly easy to see that the very memes that are the cells within the body of white nationalist militarism are ubiquitous within our general cultural norms. The film genre that most closely corresponds to a fascist mindset is the male revenge fantasy, wherein after some offense is given that signifies the breakdown of order (usually resulting in the death or mortal imperilment of idealized wives or children) in which Enlightenment social conventions prove inadequate, and the release of irrational male violence is required to set the world straight again. Any reader can list these fantasies without a cue. It is one of the most common film genres in American society. R. W. Connell wrote in Masculinities (University of California Press, 1995): In gender terms, fascism was the naked reassertion of male supremacy in societies that had been moving toward equality for women. To accomplish this, fascism promoted new images of hegemonic masculinity, glorifying irrationality (the triumph of the will, thinking with the blood) and the unrestrained violence of the frontline soldier. It is in no way aberrant, when the lionized Theodore Roosevelt can be quoted saying, the timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, [italics mine] who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills stern men with empires in their brains all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the worlds work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. Roosevelt was also a lifetime member of the NRA, itself founded by Civil War veterans who were dismayed by the poor marksmanship of soldiers and decided to prepare the next generation of boys and men for armed combat. Roosevelt is often cited as a conservationist who admired the wilderness. What is less often noted is that wilderness was seen as a place where men could test themselves against raw nature, and that he referred to said wilderness as lands we have won from the Indians. Karl Rove claims to be a major fan of Teddy Roosevelt biographies and quotes Roosevelt often. The use of mythic male wartime figures is a common political ploy. Ashcroft frequently used Lincoln that way to justify his own attacks on civil liberties, implicitly comparing the phony War on Terror to the American Civil War. This is not news; but it does support my general thesis that some key elements of fascism are already norms for broad sections of American society.

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This should give us a special sense of concern that the military -- under pressure from a retention and recruitment crisis -- has relaxed the screening process against white nationalists joining the military precisely to gain military training and combat experience. This not only allows more of these dangerous ideologues into the military, it gives them unprecedented access to other combat veterans, brutalized into the sociopathy of war and inured to white supremacy through the inevitable racialization of the occupied enemy. What makes this particularly alarming is that another essential element for the emergence of fascism is a national enemy. It is not unremarkable that the very people who question the Federal Government as an extension of ZOG/Illuminati/World-Government have also accepted the narrative -- constructed by that self-same US government for its own martial purposes -- of a highly organized, technologically advanced terrorist threat: al Qaeda. This has replaced the vastly overstated threat of the World Communist Conspiracy that proved so useful for the post-WWII American security state. The fact that immigration is now routinely portrayed as a security issue (letting terrorists in), at the same time that anti-immigrant vigilantism is being supported by public figures like CNNs Lou Dobbs (arguable already a fascist) and Governor Schwarzenegger, should give all of us pause not only because we are now training future McVeys, but because the immigration polemics are finding a receptive audience even among so-called moderates and liberals among the middle-class. The generalized flexibility of the term terrorist makes it infinitely more useful as a political instrument than a specific nation or regime, and so invests the term with a long half-life. The fact that al Qaeda is a fiction created by the US government -- a fact well documented by researchers like Jason Burke, author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (Penguin Books, 2004), and even the militarily-connected Rand Corporation that referred to al Qaeda as a notion. In a stunning bit of linguistic legerdemain, the actual mass movement of political Islam has been recoded by the neo-cons as Islamo-fascism; and among the cryptolibertarians of the white right, fascist is an epithet reserved now for liberals. With the same semantic abracadabra, the notion that is al Qaeda is transformed by our cultural paranoia in such a way that every Arab, every Muslim, every immigrant, every dissident, every person of color, every (choose your enemy) is a threat; and the world is divided between Us and the Dark Other with no resolution except the agonal, and could -- with economic dislocation as the catalyst -- tumble us into a paroxysm of white nationalist hyper-masculinity as prelude to a new, uniquely American what? I will close with a comment by my friend, Steve McClure, a resident of Washington DC -- itself a study in colonization and social contrasts: I hate the word fascist. It has been bandied about so much and brings up images of Storm troopers in grainy newsreels that it seems devoid of meaning. Furthermore, classical fascism was possible only in a mass society, organized along industrial lines, with one-to-many communications. Classical fascism is a reactionary modernism, a response to class struggle. Both German and Italian variants came to power after the defeat of revolutionary upsurges. I think our own situation is very different, and a better term needs to be found that captures the unique qualities of our reactionary postmodernism. Military police state doesnt quite cut it. Fascism implies policing of 224

thought as well as bodies, today's reaction is selective, policing bodies but allowing private speech and the empty illusions of parliamentary democracy to stand. Many-to-many (as opposed to one-to-many) communications is a given, the question of agency is at the core. The ironies of the order of magnitude point to a resurgence of extralegal action to suppress embryonic resistance. The paramilitary policing of urban areas points to selective application of force, the lock and load approach to crowd control in demonstrations and in civic events unrelated to politics particularly in the gendered construction of place -cities being the dark, female and threatening Other in a binary of patriarchy and race. In DC, polarization is advanced; the commons is reduced to controlled civic zones. In DC, secular democratic forms of resistance have been destroyed or co-opted. The shadow economy has blossomed in the void left by civil society institutions. The default is a particularly virulent form of patriarchy -- thuggish and crude, ironically a site that reproduces the existing order of things through transgression. I wish someone would find a word that captures the uniqueness of the emerging reactionary trend defines it so that it can be confronted head on rather than obliquely. This trend of ignoring the backgrounds of military inductees --driven by numerical necessity -- is swelling the ranks of tomorrows vigilantes of reaction. People have the mental habit of assuming that the powerful control their own outcomes. They dont. The militarization of police forces, white flight and urban abandonment, even the international system of dollar hegemony that the military backstops ... these all develop with multiple determinations, more akin to weather than strategy, with the larger system taking on a character independent of the agents within it. Changing outcomes is not the same as controlling them. My greatest anxiety for my two grandchildren is not that they will be the victims of a plot but the inheritors of inertia and a society of good Germans, while society dives into a long period of unanticipated macho warlordism ... and, oh by the way, ecocide. We already have whole sections of Americain the former enclaves of a now deracinated working classwhere hopelessness exists alongside police forces that function very like a military occupation force. Before the war, these occupation zonesfilled with idled, angry, dark-skinned youthswere our middle-class nightmare, the Dark Chaos that inevitably leads us back to the patriarchal default, to militarized masculinity, and to the cultural celebration of bounty hunting and sexual revenge in feudal prisons. Alas, the place-marker of a war on drugsthat created the largest national prison population on the planetcouldnt create the pretext for bases in Southwest Asia, so the war on terror will have to do. The recruitment crisis that has opened the door to neo-Nazi youths entering military service was anything but a plan. The term before the war that proponents used to describe its outcome was cakewalk." Now even putative liberals have copped to their own version of white mans burden, saying (the rhetorical) we cannot abandon Iraq, lest we leave behind a terrible state of disorder. And so we continue down that hoary, blood-drenched path of civilizing missions. 225

The Bush administration never tires of telling us how war is necessary to protect us from disorder. We need to ask ourselves, however, what sowing the winds of war abroad will reap at home. They are not Arabs who are painting Aryan Nations graffiti on the shattered walls of Baghdad.
THE END

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