Joe Lieberman is the man who acted like a planted troll in the Al Gore campaign in 2000, pulling the rug out from underneath democracy and the Gore campaign by publicly announcing he did not support Gore in pushing further for a recount that would – if all eligible votes had been (re)counted - most probably have found Gore the winner.
Lieberman is also a man who promotes what is often called the Neo Conservative or NeoCon agenda.
One core of it is the spreading the American version of democracy and organizing the economy – both of which I would propose have not exactly proven themselves to be worth exporting by - around the world.
But rather than relying on other nations and people elsewhere adopting them out of their own free will and by their own actions, and accepting that some might not be so inclined, Neo Conservatives would like the US to take more offensive actions. US can send in diplomats, political and financial representatives, in a first attempt to “sell” the American Way. If that does not work, the next step would be to send in secret agents from the CIA or a Military Special Force Command to “work the ground. The US Military can be used as a last line of offense in this “militarized diplomacy of threat”[iii].
Naturally, no ideological agenda would survive the US “democracy” and gain political power, if it was not supported by Big Money. The NeoCon agenda, however, seem to often coincide with financial interests. Private sector players tend to benefit from the financial structures and agencies the NeoCons wants to export, which includes heavy deregulation of markets and increased privatization. Additionally, the NeoCon agenda would mean a continuation of the highly profitable “gift that keeps on giving” of an active and extensively used US Military.
In the ruins of military intervention, appropriate financial and political structures and agencies can then be erected.
The McCain investigator interviewed on Democracy Now describes the views of the people courting the man plotted to be the next US president:
ROBERT DREYFUSS: If you look at the list of people who say they’re advising the McCain camp, you find a broad range of people. You find people like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Larry Eagleburger. These are the traditional kind of Nixon-era realists, many of whom certainly wouldn’t be considered liberals, but who certainly are realists. But when you look at McCain’s positions, his views on things, you don’t find any of the influence of people like Eagleburger and Scowcroft.
What you see instead is that the rest of McCain’s advisers, and you named several of them—James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has been traveling and campaigning with McCain and who I interviewed for this piece; Bill Kristol, who’s very close to McCain for probably a decade and has been kind of an angel sitting on his shoulder and whispering in his ear all that time; people like Scheunemann; people like Max Boot; Ralph Peters; there’s a long list of people who have joined the McCain advisory team—and it’s these people whom McCain listens to when it comes to foreign policy. He certainly hasn’t expressed anything in any foreign policy area that you would identify with the Republican realist camp. He’s much closer to the neocons.
And he seems to be, as I said earlier, the true neocon himself, someone who, after early in his career in the ’80s being kind of suspicious about some foreign interventions that happened at that time, at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, McCain seemed to have felt unburdened, like now American power can express itself. And that’s when he attached himself to the neoconservative vision that America, as the sole superpower, could throw its weight around, could remake the world in its own image and that there would be no effective opposition to it
The election of 2008 might not be rigged, except for the structural bias towards candidates favored by big money and one of the only two parties allowed to win. But McCain will continue an already well underway change of the US society and role in the world.
If McCain does not win, the financial and political interests and backers who made Bush president and handled him through his presidency might have enough patience to sit through a Democratic presidency with less aggressive (but not halted) implementation of their plans. However, I fear that they might not have that patience and that we will see an expansion of the Iraq war into Iran or Syria before the Bush presidency is over should McCain not emerge as his successor.
What I would like you to take with you is this fact: the US President elected this year will have powers and opportunities unprecedented. More than ever it will matter what interests he or she will truly represent in the use of these powers.
Take that into consideration when you evaluate the candidates of 2008.
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