All right, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, and our guest today is Mark Angler.
He's an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, that's fpif.org.
He's the author of How to Rule the World, The Coming Battle Over the World Economy.
His own personal website is democracyuprising.com, and he's got a new piece at tomdispatch.com, which is called How to Rule the World After Bush, subtitled Globalizers, Neocons, or...
Welcome to the show, Mark.
It's a pleasure to be on.
It's great to have you here.
There's a very interesting article here, just the very kinds of questions I like to ask that you get into here.
Basically, it seems like we have this split.
People kind of give it different definitions.
Sometimes it's supply-siders versus Keynesians, or it's neocons versus neoliberals, the Council on Foreign Relations versus the American Enterprise Institute.
Different splits in factions and how the world ought to be dominated by the American empire.
You go through here, and basically you're saying that it looks to you like big business has decided they really prefer the democratic model of ruling the world with the help of our allies in a more multilateral fashion rather than the neoconservative, hyper-imperialism of the neocons.
Is that right?
I think that's right.
It's a very interesting moment that we're entering right now in this post-Bush period as we move into the next administration and try to figure out what is the damage of the Bush regime and what comes next.
I think that people in peace and justice movements are very, very well aware of the hole that we're going to have to dig ourselves out of, of the many bad things that happen.
It's interesting, though, to look at the fact that the Bush administration has not just divided the American people, divided the world, he's also divided those who we might say rule the world.
He's divided the business and political elite to a large extent.
That's exactly the dilemma that you were describing.
Why having this neocon vision that's focused on U.S. military power, that's focused unilaterally, that disregards these multilateral institutions, it's crafted a very distinctive approach to international affairs.
This is what I call imperial globalization.
I think that imperial globalization is actually quite distinct from the previous model, the Clinton-era model of what I call corporate globalization.
Now, there are certainly ways in which those two overlap, and they both envision a global capitalist marketplace, but they differ very significantly in how they manage international affairs.
I think that you're absolutely right in summarizing that there's a lot of the business elite that prefers the Clinton model.
They think that the neocons are reckless.
They think this militarism is crazy, and they think that it's creating backlash in many of these markets overseas that they worked so hard to open up during the Clinton years.
I would argue that for every Halliburton or Blackwater, these sort of mercantilist corporations that were very much involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, you have a whole other set of corporations, the Coca-Cola's, the Disney's, the Nike's, these global brands that are actually very freaked out about what's been happening.
They don't see this as good for business, and they're looking to go back to that other model of corporate globalization.
Isn't that interesting?
It's too bad they couldn't think of that before, but yeah, I think you really define the dividing line there very clearly, right?
It's the corporations who are intimately connected with the DOD, the Halliburton's who get to follow the DOD around and build bases wherever the military goes on one side versus the rest of big business on the other.
If you're trying to sell Pepsi in the world, this is a hell of a time to do it.
That's right.
There are some interesting points about this, about what happened even early on in the invasion of Iraq.
There was always a portion of the business world that wasn't comfortable with this at all and a portion of the Republican Party.
You have these sort of elder statesmen, the more traditional, pragmatic, realist, business-oriented Republicans.
For example, Brent Scowcroft was this key, key advisor to the first Bush regime.
Even George Bush's father himself is more in this realist model of foreign policy.
Well, Scowcroft writes an editorial in the Wall Street Journal saying, we shouldn't attack Iraq.
It's counterproductive.
It's bad, and it's bad for the economy is one of the points that he made.
Interestingly, this is something I've done previously and something I do in my book is sort of track business dissatisfaction with the war.
Certainly business did not step up and really vocally oppose the war to begin with in part because business doesn't like to put itself in this political position where it's denouncing the White House, but it was always grumbling a little bit.
Especially after the invasion happened, that level of grumbling increased over time.
I don't know whether we should believe this or not, but for some reason this rang true to me in Bob Woodward's latest book, State of Denial, I think it is.
He says that James Baker was sitting on the couch watching George Bush give his, you have 48 hours to leave Iraq, but we're invading whether you do or not, speech.
And Baker turned to whoever it was on the couch and said, I told him not to do that.
It's an interesting anecdote.
You know, it's hard to, I think that it is hard to say, you know, some of this, some of this stuff is now being written as revisionist history and now that the war in Iraq has gone so far awry that no one wants to defend it, it's hard to say who's just trying to clean up their image retrospectively and who actually opposed it from the start in the same way that Hillary Clinton is now campaigning as an opponent of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, while she had previously in her autobiography called it one of the defining accomplishments of her husband's administration.
So I think that there is some rewriting of history there, but you know, I wouldn't be surprised.
James Baker is exactly the type of person within the Republican Party, you know, that doesn't believe in this, in this neocon stuff.
And they're the type of people that are leaving the party.
You know, they're going to the Democrats increasingly.
And for those of us, you know, who don't like either the imperial model of globalization, the Bush model, nor the Clinton model of corporate globalization, you know, this is, creates a real fight for us, right?
This is creating a battle, certainly for the economic soul of the Democratic Party, where you're having these free trade elites latching on to the Democratic Party in an effort to, you know, have a return to those type of more soft power economic policies of domination that that profited them very handsomely, certainly in the 1990s.
But even in the decades before that, that's actually creating a lot of interesting divides right now on the campaign trail, you know, both Clinton and Obama were campaigning as opponents of NAFTA, they were campaigning as opponents or campaigning against the bilateral trade deal with Colombia, you know, Hillary Clinton was making the same type of arguments that many of us progressives make about this, that Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a union organizer that anyone who's vocally supporting their right to organize or supporting human rights, putting their life in their own hands.
And this is hardly a country that should be held up as an ideal trading partner.
But at the same time that she's making those arguments on the campaign trail, it comes out that one of her chief strategists, Mark Penn, a guy with a long history of corporate lobbying, nefarious corporate lobbying, defending corporate abuses in Washington, D.C., it turns out that Mark Penn, his consulting firm had received $300,000 from the Colombian government last year to strategize on how to get this trade deal passed.
And Barack Obama had some trouble on the NAFTA issue too, right?
That's exactly right.
In his case, if he was campaigning against, you know, NAFTA, saying this is a bad deal for working people in the United States, this is a mistake, this is bad foreign policy, his senior economic guy, a University of Chicago economist named Austin Goolsbee, he goes up to meet the Canadians and he says, you know, disregard this stuff that's going on on the campaign trail, this is just political posturing.
You don't need to worry about this.
If we get elected, we're going to have a, you know, responsible trade position, quote unquote.
Now, see, what's especially interesting here besides these, and we got time, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but to me what's really interesting is when you talk about those of us who oppose either model for how to conquer the world, you speak for yourself and obviously for me too, but I'm not a progressive at all, I'm a libertarian.
And I'm opposed to the very existence of IMF, the World Bank, NAFTA, and all these things, but I am a free trader.
I want absolute free trade.
I don't think government has any right to stand in between, you know, individuals doing deals no matter where in the world they are.
And yet, here I am side by side with you, and I'm not exactly sure where on the left you place yourself, but you and I are sitting here side by side opposing the very same corporatist, as you said earlier, mercantilist structures of government in bed writing massive welfare checks for big business and holding the gun to the heads of foreigners in order to take their wealth from them.
Right.
And, you know, I think that if we got into the issues, we'd find some area where we disagree, but there's also a lot of common ground here.
And one point is that, you know, I think that the term free trade should just be retired from American politics, you know.
Everything that's been talked about as a quote-unquote free trade deal is not a free trade deal, you know.
These are elaborately negotiated schemes that go on for hundreds and thousands of pages of deals.
If you had a free trade deal, it would be like two pages long, you know, the trade deals you're talking about.
It'd just be, okay, no tariff barriers, you know, signed here.
But it's not.
You know, these things are written by corporate lobbyists, and they're filled with, you know, clause after clause, sketching out rules and loopholes to protect certain interests at the expense of others.
So I'm not someone who's against trade.
I am someone who says, you know, we have to look at what terms we're trading on, you know, what is the nature of this trade.
If we're trading in exploitation of human labor, you know, we're trading with a country that has no labor standards at all, and, you know, we're dealing with sweatshop economies.
If we're trading in environmental abuses, that's not the type of trade that we want to have.
Well, from my point of view, the best way to fix those problems is as much trade as possible makes those poor people more and more wealthy, then they have more and more ability to stand up for their rights in the future and so forth.
What's happened with China, basically?
You know, the more Chinese we make rich, the less people in China are going to be able to tolerate the Communist Party's dictatorships.
Right.
You know, that's a sunshine type of argument, and I think that there's some truth to the fact that engaging, you know, China can be better than locking it out entirely in terms of bringing about human rights abuses.
At the same time, I think that we probably would have some disagreement here about whether, you know, a total sort of open market solution is ever going to self-correct and is ever going to allow basic human rights at the workplace, you know, create a situation in which people are organizing.
All right.
Well, let's talk a little bit about this structure of the former imperialism, the Clinton model, the corporate globalization model, which you differentiate from the neocon model.
Let's, you know, see if you can remind people exactly how does this work, the IMF and the World Bank, and what they call free market reforms in other people's countries.
Right.
Well, what happened here is really for a series of decades, you know, coming out of the World War II period, you had a set of multilateral institutions, you know, and these are the institutions that you just mentioned, the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, which stands for the World Trade Organization.
These were the final form of these institutions.
These are sometimes known as the Bretton Woods Institutions, which was a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire that was held right after World War II.
And the interesting thing about this is that, you know, and this is one thing I write about in the article, I quote George Mambiot, who's a progressive columnist and a British Guardian, and he sort of says the paradox of neocon thinking is that being so focused on US unilateralism, they actually dismantled this system, that by putting a little bit of a cooperative multilateral veneer on things, it actually locked up US power very, very effectively over a series of decades.
You know, these are institutions that, on the one hand, require a little bit of international cooperation.
On the other hand, the United States has always dominated these institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and it's been able to get its way in the world through using these things.
And during the Clinton administration, you know, foreign policy by and large, and certainly economic foreign policy, was essentially being run through these institutions, through the World Bank and the IMF.
And basically the way that this worked was over the period of the last 25 or 30 years, we said to poorer countries, look, if you want to get development loans, if you want to get the type of assistance you need to develop your economy, if you want to have access even to private credit, you have to play by our rules.
And our rules were a very, very radical market fundamentalist type of policy.
Total deregulation, privatization, cuts to social services.
Well, they never cut off the welfare checks for the millionaires and billionaires in these countries, though.
Right.
That's definitely true.
Right.
That's definitely true.
So that's not free market fundamentalism.
That's fascism.
Right.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing.
You know, when this sort of moved from, you know, for example, when telecom gets sold to Mexico, well, who does it get sold to, you know, get sold off to sort of a class of oligarchs.
The same has happened in Russia, a very well positioned group of people who sort of loot the state and buy up all the things.
And now you have Carlos Slim becoming the richest man in the world, you know, a Mexican billionaire who bought up the newly privatized telecom system.
The point of this is that this hasn't helped the poor in the developing world.
You know, this is something that, you know, has created a huge gap between the rich and the poor.
This is a system that failed miserably.
And because of that, there's there's a rebellion against, you know, against these type of what you know, they call, quote unquote, free trade economics going on throughout the world.
And we certainly see that in Latin America right now, where you have you know, you've had a series of at least a dozen elections since the year 2000 that's putting progressive leaders in power that are demanding independence from Washington, D.C. and that are taking, you know, unprecedented reversals of some of this past neoliberal policy.
Well, now, the free trade area of the Americas from, you know, Alaska to Argentina was supposed to be complete by 2005.
Do you think that if Bush had continued the Clinton policies, it would have been able to get away with that?
Well, now here we are three years later and nowhere near it.
Oh, that that deal is dead in the water.
It is totally falling apart.
It's totally collapsed.
And he is a very, very exciting thing.
You know, certainly for those of us on the left who spent a long, you know, a lot of energy protesting against this, you know, we haven't really celebrated the fact that this thing has collapsed.
You know, people aren't really talking about or the fact that the IMF, you know, IMF, its loan portfolio has gone from being around 100 billion dollars just in 2004 to be well under 20 billion dollars today.
There's just two countries, Turkey and Pakistan, that have the bulk of its outstanding loans.
Latin America, just as of 2005, accounted for 80 percent of IMF lending.
Today, that's less than one percent.
All of this is creating a lot more space in the world for countries to choose their own economic path.
Explain that.
Explain that.
How is it that South America is completely off the IMF's tit now?
Well, you know, their economies started doing well.
They actually rebelled against the IMF prescriptions in different ways.
In the case of Argentina, high or in the case of Venezuela, you have high oil prices that's allowed, you know, Hugo Chavez to pursue a populist policy to put more money into the region.
China and India are investing in the region.
Argentina, whose economy totally collapsed in 2001, it has been considered a star pupil of the International Monetary Fund.
It breaks with Washington and its economy has actually done quite well since.
All of these countries are just paying off their loans to IMF early and saying, good riddance, you know, we don't want to have to, it's worth it for us to pay this off and never have to listen to you again.
That's a much better economic situation for us than being under the thumb of these loans going forward.
And that's happening in Asia, too.
The same countries that were burned by the Asia financial crisis in 1997 and 1998, they're now building up huge, huge currency reserves so they never again have to go begging back to Washington.
All of these things are creating a lot more space in the international system.
You know, it's a much more open world.
In some respects, it's a more dangerous world.
But I think that this is the Bush legacy, to give us a world that actually has some very interesting possibilities and, you know, some positive possibilities for change as well.
It almost sounds like you're making the case that empire just doesn't work, that there are, I don't know, effects that follow from causes and things like that.
And I don't know, maybe people in South America are backlashing for, you know, for one example, backlashing against the policies of the IMF and the World Bank.
I remember Greg Palast talked about how Hugo Chavez was making loans and at low interest rates and then he wasn't using the loans as an excuse to loot the countries he was loaning money to.
He was just loaning them money.
And they were paying him back and everything was going fine.
Meanwhile, the American empire comes and calls it a loan when they rape your economy and basically liquidate everything and leave a dry husk of, you know, a nation of starving people and for some reason the world doesn't want to continue going along with that forever, Right.
And, you know, the very interesting aspect for me about this is, you know, as someone who's an opponent of this sort of, you know, big business model of labor for capitalism, you know, I think that the fact that this is sort of backfiring on itself, the fact that the neocon program falls apart is obviously a positive thing, but even for those businesses, you know, I mean, there's a point at which, you know, these major corporations should be recognizing that this is not really paying off for them.
I mean, the Iraq war was a costly bungle, even from a purely, you know, capitalist market perspective.
And that's why you're getting some of this defection from the Republican Party, for example, going over to the Democrats, looking for a return to this sort of multilateralism that they think is just better business.
You know, they're not doing this from any sort of progressive perspective.
They just are basically saying this is no way to run an empire.
Well, you know, like I was saying, I'm a libertarian, so I look at it as sort of a double tragedy where all these people are, you know, for another generation or two or who knows what all around the world are being turned off of the idea of private property rights and open markets, because when they hear those words, they think of, you know, imperialism government coming and using force against them and calling it free market capitalism, so they turn to socialism, which, you know, in my eyes is completely the wrong direction.
It's horrible.
Well, I mean, I think one thing that I think we're going to have some differences there, but I think one thing we can agree on is that, you know, the current system has sometimes been called free market socialism or Wall Street socialism, where, you know, profits are privatized, but risk is socialized.
When banks on Washington, D.C., you know, advocate for a totally deregulated financial system, but then as soon as they start getting into trouble, you know, making all these bad loans in the subprime markets, all of a sudden this is not, you know, their own investment and their own issues.
All of a sudden this is a public crisis where they're going to Washington, D.C. to get huge bailouts for, you know, working people who got bamboozled on buying a house they couldn't afford.
I mean, those are bailouts for the big banks who are doing the bamboozling.
You know, that's a crazy system, and I think that we can agree there.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, of course, my argument is no socialism for anybody, especially the rich people.
But in any case, yeah, we certainly agree halfway there.
I wanted to share with you and the audience just the first paragraph of this essay by Richard Perle from The Guardian in England from Friday, March 21st, 2003.
This is when Richard Perle thought he was the world's greatest hero, riding high on the wonderful victory in Iraq.
Or, no, I guess it's right before the war, sorry.
He says, Hussein's reign of terror is about to end.
He will go down quickly, but not alone.
In a parting irony, he will take the U.N. down with him.
Well, not the whole U.N.
The good works part will survive.
The low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain.
The chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat.
What will die is the fantasy of the U.N. as the foundation of a new world order.
As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.
So now, I guess my question is, with Barack Obama on his way back in, how much damage has Richard Perle done to this new order under international law?
Well, you know, that's a very interesting question, because I think the situation we're entering is, you have a moment where the imperial model of globalization has clearly shown itself to be unsustainable.
Now, John McCain has not gotten the memo.
By all indications, McCain very much wants to continue the same type of foreign policy, military and economic, as the Bush administration did, maybe with some slight modifications.
But basically, we're looking at business as usual here.
We're looking at more of the same.
Yeah, just higher taxes, that's all.
Yeah, potentially.
That remains to be seen.
But on the Democratic side, you know, there are a bunch of these dismal elites that want to go back to the Quintonian corporate model, but there's a real question now as to whether they can.
You know, we don't really know if that's even possible to go back to it, even if we were to think that that was desirable, which I do not.
You know, the fact of the matter is the neocons have really messed up this international system, you know, and the world is changing.
You know, it's not, the United States is running into all sorts of problems, some of which were foreseeable, some of which were predictable, some of which you can blame the Bush administration for not responding to sooner, whether this is, you know, our dependency on foreign oil and our total refusal to come up with real solutions to that in a timely manner, whether this is, you know, the economic crises that the United States is facing, whether this is the rise of foreign rivals, you know, that are counterbalancing U.S. power, that are creating something that political scientists call a multipolar moment instead of a unipolar moment where the United States holds all the cards.
All these things are creating a situation where there's no going back to what the corporate globalizers might consider the good old days.
You know, I think that they're going to try, and I think it'll be interesting to see what shapes up in this period.
I mean, I think it's going to be something, probably something new, probably something different that we haven't seen before.
Now those of us who want, you know, want something better, economic systems that actually serve the majority of people in the world instead of just the people at the top, there's some possibilities for change here.
You know, there's a number of those possibilities that I'm excited about, whether it's looking at models in Latin America, whether it's thinking about markets in a different way.
You know, I think that there are some real possibilities for that now.
But there's some real dangers in the system as well.
Yeah, it seems like, well, you used that phrase, the multi-polar world, where power is just spreading out all over the place, and I know, I haven't read it yet, but I read an excerpt, Fareed Zachariah, who I guess is considered a realist, Council on Foreign Relations, School of Foreign Policy type, has this new book, The Post-American World, about the rise of China and India, and they're just not going to be little subsets of our empire.
There's just nothing we can do about that.
Right.
And, you know, then there's different ways to look at that.
The defenders of U.S. empire, Niall Ferguson, for example, will say, you know, what are you progressive people complaining about with American empire, American hegemony?
If it's not the U.S. empire, the alternative is Chinese empire, and the Chinese don't even have any veneer of liberal democracy or human rights in their society, and so don't be naive about this.
The United States is the best of all empires.
You know, there's one interesting thing, which is that the right and the Bush years actually started using that word, empire.
You know, that was something that was totally taboo in U.S. political discussion, but the right actually started using this in defending, in making the case for U.S. empire.
Now, I think that Niall Ferguson is very disingenuous.
I think his track record as a human rights defender is very thin, especially when it comes to the United States supporting military governments in Latin America or other places in the world.
However, you know, there is something of a point here, you know, only in that while we oppose U.S. empire, I think that we also have to build ties with human rights movements, with pro-democracy movements in other parts of the world, you know, people organizing for labor rights, whether it's in China or India or where have you.
Hey, let me ask you this.
What do you think when you hear people talk about, well, maybe we need to do something about Burma or maybe, you know, the genocide, the mass killings, it's not really a genocide, but the mass killings, hundreds of thousands of people in the Darfur region of Sudan, somebody's got to do something about it never again.
What do you say?
Well, you know, I think that we absolutely need to do something about it.
The question is, you know, who is the we here?
What is the actor?
And is this the state using its military muscle to come in and intervene?
You know, I'm someone who's very much a social movement person.
I'm someone who's, you know, very engaged in trying to support active solidarity with human rights movements throughout the world, you know, and I think that that's absolutely something we need to do.
You know, we need to be shining a spotlight on these issues.
We need to be supporting human rights defenders.
Now, does that mean that we should be going in and trying to, you know, impose democracy at the barrel of a gun?
I don't think that that's how democracies emerge.
And I don't think I think Iraq is a pretty dramatic example of the failure of that type of ideal.
I don't think that you can write a history of U.S. non-intervention, you know, the instances where the United States hasn't done something without writing a history of U.S. intervention.
You know, people say, for example, well, we didn't intervene in the Armenian genocide.
Well, you know, the United States was not just sitting on a pan.
It was busy in the Philippines, for example.
You know, you know, you can't talk about the Rwandans without talking about the Iraq, you know, and the fact that the United States, the use of its military power has a very long and problematic history that, you know, that we can't overlook in figuring out what needs to be done.
Yeah, that's a great point.
You know, there's this New York Times article from a couple of days ago, famine looms as wars rend horn of Africa.
And I was just thinking, you know, it won't be long before the do-gooders are calling for intervention in Somalia, except that whoops, this is our war in Somalia.
That's why everybody's starving there.
That's why there's 700,000 refugees.
That's why it's a greater crisis, even than Darfur.
That's why it's the second greatest humanitarian crisis on Earth after Iraq.
We're the cause of it, not the solution.
Right.
And I think, you know, as citizens, there's lots that we can do about this.
You know, we can we can lobby our own government, we can act in solidarity with movements in other countries.
We can educate ourselves about what's going on in other parts of the world.
You know, this is certainly not an argument for, you know, self-interested complacency here.
I would argue that we need to be internationalists.
We need to extend solidarity to people struggling in other parts of the world.
But we need to do that in a way that's not, you know, sort of one that reverts to a reactionary sort of imperialism.
And, you know, when you mention Niall Ferguson and a good empire, we're a better empire than the Chinese would be or whatever.
Well, the reason that, you know, America would be would tend to be a better empire because of, for example, our respect for basic human rights and so forth, is because we weren't an empire.
If we now that we're an empire, we lose all those ideals that we got guys torturing people under American employee right now.
And, you know, this whole thing about we're better than the Chinese, well, is that really true anymore when we are the ones causing all the greatest catastrophes on Earth in the name of benevolent global hegemony?
And, you know, I think that there's a there's a longstanding argument there that some of this foreign policy stuff, it's not just over there.
You know, this really corrodes the foundations of democracy here at home.
You know, at the same time, we're out, you know, torturing people abroad or condoning torture abroad.
You know, we see some of the biggest assaults of civil liberties at home going on at the same time.
And historically, certainly there's a question as to whether you can have an imperial foreign policy and imperial outlook to the rest of the world and still have a true democracy at home.
And I think that there's reason to raise serious questions about that proposition.
Indeed.
All right.
So sounds like the basic thrust of this article.
And again, it's at Tom Dispatch dot com today.
Mark Engler, how to rule the world after Bush.
It sounds like what you're saying here is that many of the big business billionaires in this country at least halfway get it and want to at least try to revert back more to the Clintonian Democratic model of ruling the world.
Now, I think you mentioned in the article hedge fund managers have all just donated to Democrats over Republicans nine to one or something like that.
Can you share with us some more indications that these people are really jumping ship on the Republican Party?
Right.
You know, I mean, we can't overstate the case here.
I mean, the Republican Party has its own set of big money donors.
And, you know, it's not as if, you know, there's the entire business community is leaving the Republicans.
I mean, that's obviously not the case.
However, you know, you do have a notable shift.
And so, for example, the hedge fund managers, you know, who run some of the wealthiest individuals in the United States run these largely unregulated funds.
In 2007, they donated to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee at a rate nine to one to which they donated to the Republican Committee.
You know, the numbers were really stark in that case.
And you have that class of people that's much more excited about Obama certainly than they are about John McCain.
You know, there's some sectoral divide in capital here that we can see very clearly.
And you have that Wall Street Journal article.
This is a great article to read.
I link to it there at TomDispatch.com where the Wall Street Journal is even talking about this shift.
And actually, Tom Englehart, in his introduction to the essay, also notes some specific individuals, both the Wall Street Journal article and Tom's introduction, talk about some specific individuals, some of whom consider themselves lifelong Republicans who are members of high standards of the business community who are all part of this shift.
Well, you know, I one time spoke with a guy who was a consultant to a major American corporation that makes, I don't know, some significant portion of its money from exports, who years ago, three years ago or so, I think, was lamenting to him, to the consultant, that this is just killing us.
Brand USA is just getting slaughtered out there.
And we are losing so much money.
And we want to make phone calls.
You know, and I think he suggested to them, why don't you guys call Dick Cheney?
You're bazillionaires.
You run New York City.
Call him up on the phone and explain to him that he's really, really making your product look bad and hurting the core of American business here.
And they responded, well, you know, we don't really want to start that much trouble.
But apparently they were really feeling the heat from this years back.
Well, and I think that this is why this is sort of one of the unreported stories of the Iraq war.
You know, business hasn't been, you know, vocal in an organized type of way.
But the grumbling there is very, very interesting.
And this is, you know, from a left perspective, this is interesting, too, because I think those of us who are involved in social movements, you know, can very easily see the thousand and one ways in which our movements are divided and fractured and we can't quite get it together, you know, around a particular cause.
But then we look at political and business elites and we sometimes think of them as if they're this spiff, you know, as if they're operating with a seamless, unified front.
But in fact, there are all sorts of divided loyalties and conflicting interests within capital.
And sometimes I think that those divisions can go far in determining what space exists to create an alternative.
And I think that that's definitely the case as we move into this post-Bush moment.
Yeah.
Well, in a way, too, it sort of makes me feel helpless.
Like when I compare the anti-war movement or, you know, like your various kind of leftist domestic movements and stuff versus these guys, they have these wars in heaven, you know, where they're divided.
But they're still so far outside of our grasp that it really is.
That was Chris Floyd's phrase over at Empire burlesque block.
It really is so far out of our control.
We're like Kremlin knowledge is here, you know, sitting far away examining them as best we can.
Can we really do anything about it?
What are we supposed to do about it?
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, I think it does create there are opportunities that emerge because of it.
You know, if it is something where there are anti-war movements can look at, OK, here's some you know, here's some support and sectors of the business community that have some influence.
You know, we should jump on that.
We should be able to use this if it's, you know, if it's a question where there's a right left, you know, alliance against something like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
That creates some opportunities, you know, some moments where we're not going to say, you know, we're bosom buddies, you know, but but if we both disagree with what the IMF is doing in the world and we're going to, you know, dismantle this institution, that's something that I would definitely push for.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is sort of my little pet project is trying to find leftists and rightists that I agree with so that we can hopefully move toward some sort of realignment along, you know, generally Jeffersonian lines and try to keep America America before it's just driven off a cliff.
Seems like with the police state and, you know, with the widespread looting of the American people and the wars overseas, there's a lot that we ought to be able to get together on.
And and, you know, what the hey, let's argue about Social Security in 10 years or something.
All right.
You know, after we get our act together, there are some very pressing challenges, I think, that we need to address.
And that idea that the United States has been trying to create an empire that we see, you know, in places like Iraq, that's definitely at the top of the list.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I want to thank you for your time today.
This has really been insightful, everybody.
That's Mark Engler.
His new article is at Tom Dispatch dot com.
And I'm flipping back here.
It's called How to Rule the World After Bush.
He's an analyst for Foreign Policy and Focus.
The website there is FPIF dot org.
His own website is Democracy Uprising dot com.
And the book is How to Rule the World, the coming battle over the world economy.
Thanks very much for your time today.
