We need only look at the Robocops that are now deployed in force for every demonstration and the reliance on tactical units for more and more "drug" arrests. Attorney General John Ashcroft is now preparing even further erosion of Posse Comitatus, the law that forbids the military from operating within the borders of the U.S. That erosion began with the growth of numerous liaisons between military and police. I myself participated in the army's training of the original FBI Hostage Rescue Team who have since become famous or infamous, as the case may be, and with both Los Angeles and Houston SWAT. The erosion also began with operations where the military actually augmented the Border Patrol inside the U.S. These contacts began in the early-1980s and have grown exponentially since.
The military doctrines being prepared for Pax Americana include doctrines for global urban civil war.
This dialectical relation between energy, currency, and the military is at least one key concrete condition for us to understand if we are to see into the mind of capital (big business and its political establishment) in this period of imperialism in crisis.
It appears that the "democratic" form of imperialism at this conjuncture is coming to a close, and the mailed fist of yet another form of fascism is a real possibility in the near term. There is no "democratic" way out of this accumulation crisis, and as this crisis floods back from the periphery to the core, capital's assault on the U.S. working class will be sharpened, as we are seeing with Bush's concerted attack against the debilitated American trade union movement. As in Argentina, when the inevitable tumble into severe economic polarization happens, those who count themselves "middle class" will be rapidly pauperized as the banking system closes its doors to appropriate their savings.
It is this inevitable attack on the living standards of average Americans that will either wake us to the folly of this manufactured patriotism and push us into resistance to this regime, or in the worst case, into atavistic racialism and fascism. Which it will be depends in some part on how effective some of us are at telling people in advance what they can expect...and why.
[Stan Goff retired from the U.S. Army in 1996, his last assignment being 3rd Special Forces Group. He entered military service January 1970, and his first assignment was as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam. His service took him to seven more conflict areas after Vietnam, including Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti. His assignments included 2nd Ranger Battalion, 1st Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 7th Special Forces, the Jungle Operations Training Center, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
He is the former Organizing Director for Democracy South and is now the Director of the North Carolina Network for Popular Democracy. He also works with the Southern Voting Rights Project of the Institute for Southern Studies. He authored a book about the 1994 U.S. military intervention in Haiti, called "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000).]
ENDNOTES
1. Valorization: In this context, we are referring to the process whereby the value added to a commodity in the production process is partly appropriated by non-working owners as profit.
2. Accumulation crisis: Systemic economic distress to capital based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, overproduction, currency collapse, etc. All recessions are actual accumulation crises.
3. "An Analysis of U.S. and World Oil Production Patterns Using Hubbert-Style Curves," Albert A. Bartlett Department of Physics University of Colorado at Boulder, 80309-0390 Mathematical Geology, Vol. 32, No 1, 2000
4. "Distribution and evolution of ‘recovery factor,'" "Oil Reserves Conference," Paris, Nov. 11, 1997, International Energy Agency, Jean Laherrère, Associate consultant, Petroconsultants
5. "Energetic Limits to Growth," Jay Hanson, ENERGY Magazine, spring 1999
6. Value theory: The interpretation of economic activity based on the "labor theory of value" pioneered by Marx and Engels, which states that the exchange value of a commodity is fundamentally based on the abstract socially necessary labor time required to produce it. The goal of value-theory is to go beyond "supply and demand" accounts of economic behavior to an examination of the actual social relations between people that define a social system, including political relations.
7. "The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge," Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D., Pardee Keynote Symposia, Geological Society of America Summit 2000, Reno, Nev., Nov. 13, 2000 8. "U.S. Military Bases and Empire," Monthly Review, Editors, March 2002
9. "Analysis of the IEO2001 Non-OPEC Supply Projections," Robert D. Blanchard, Northern Kentucky University, April 9, 2001
10. "The Globalization Gamble: The Dollar-Wall Street Regime and its Consequences," Peter Gowan, University of North London, Presented to the International Working Group on Value Theory 1999 mini-conference, March 12-14, 1999
11. Ibid.
12. "Making Better Transportation Choices," Molly O'Meara Sheehan, State of the World 2000, The Worldwatch Institute, 2000
13. Bartlett, op cit.
14. Duncan, op cit.
15. "Forget the Caspian Bonanza," Peter Beaumont and John Hooper, July 26, 1998, Observer (London)
16. "The World Petroleum Life Cycle", Richard C. Duncan and Walter Youngquist, Presented at the PTTC Workshop "OPEC Oil Pricing and Independent Oil Producers", Petroleum Technology Transfer Council, Petroleum Engineering Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Oct. 22, 1998
17. Ibid.
18. Beaumont and Hooper, op cit.
19. Zionism: The movement founded by Theodore Herzl at the turn of the last century in response to the worldwide experience of anti-Semitism, based on the belief in a need for a Jewish state, which the movement determined would be in Palestine. Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, and many Jews have opposed and still oppose Zionism. It has been based since early in its history on the explicit design to expropriate the land of others for the express purpose of a state controlled by a religiously-defined group, i.e., Jews. It is that design to base a Jewish-dominated state on the expropriated land of Palestinians that has led many to equate Zionism with racism. Being anti-Zionist is not synonymous with being anti-Semitic.
20. "The Militarization of Police," Frank Morales, Covert Action Quarterly, spring-summer 1999
END
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