Let's suppose USAID or some kindred agency decides to put $10 million into microloans. What used to be an initiative of a group of women at the village level, has become a high-profile, international funding activity. Long before the first rupee is seen by women in a village, NGOs, consultants, bank managers and their relatives have all taken their cut.
It's worth noting that USAID has long been connected with the CIA's foreign mission to enforce the neoliberal agenda.
Money control has become the name of the game and using money to make more money, such as with the microloans morphing into a new way for Big Finance to muscle into the turf and extort like gangsters. Perhaps the most globally contested US policy is its reliance on implementing economic sanctions when another sovereign but client state displeases the hegemon and sees his family jewels seized, as it were, the international SWIFT system gets 'weaponized'. It's the same foreign policy under the GWH Bush and Clinton administrations that saw criminal collateral damage in Iraq. ("By the end of 1995 alone, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said that after careful investigation it had determined that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions." See St. Clair's article, "The Price America Paid for Madeleine Albright" in this volume, where he asks rhetorically, "What moved those kamikaze Muslims of September 911 to embark, on the training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people?"). Many left wing critics argue that the US government's unilateral economic sanctions on other nation-states is essentially an act of war. Many of them also cite this 'worth it' policy as a causal factor in the motivation leading up to the events of 9/11. If seen so, then intentionally targeting the civilian population to make them desperate enough to overthrow their government is both terrorism and war criminality.
The US currently has economic sanctions on Iran, Syria, Russia, China, and Venezuela. In the case of the latter, with US sanctions in place since 2017, The Center for Economic and Policy Research concluded that "most of the impact of these sanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population." The CEPR notes that the punishment is collective and arbitrary, ending its report with an assignation of criminality:
We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory. They are also illegal under international law and treaties that the US has signed, and would appear to violate US law as well.
Indeed, if international law worked as it should, if the UN had teeth, then many a Nazi-American would have found himself in the docket at The Hague and it would be a different world. (In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines an alternative history, based on facts, if America had elected the Nazi-appeasing, white supremacist, aero-hero Charles Lindbergh president election). Now we face another alternative history, one that sees us succumbing to climate change catastrophe thanks, in large part, to the endless wars of the deep state-driven Pentagon, the world's largest environmental polluter, according to the Brown University Cost of War Report. In Orgy of Thieves St. Clair briefly tackles this bellicosity in his essay, "Venezuela and the Imperial Script." He begins by pointing out that 'Cha'vez was the best thing to happen to Venezuela's poor in a very long time.' He brought health care, education and literacy programs, and school meals to the poor. Writes St. Clair, "
[T]he economy grew at close to 12 percent soon after, and with world oil prices near $40 a barrel at the time, the government had extra billions that it put into social programs. So naturally the United States wanted him out, just as the rich in Venezuela did. Cha'vez was re-elected in 2000 for a six-year term. A US-backed coup against him was badly botched in 2002.
This sounds an awful lot like the situation in Chile, with the CIA fomenting a coup when the democratically-elected Allende government began moving toward a socialist agenda. In a now oft-repeated interview snippet from The War on Democracy (2007), investigative reporter John Pilger got the former Latin American bureau chief for the CIA, Duane Clarridge, to crow his hubris, telling the world that, sure, the CIA did Chile, and that they would keep on doing for "national security" purposes, and that the world had best get used to it, and if we didn't like it we could all just "lump it." American foreign policy in a nutshell.
Naturally, such nasty and blatant pathological gangsterism brings the chickens home to roast. America's global posture meets new resistance to the soft unilateral declaration of war that economic sanctions represent. America's incursions and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and its drone warfare program bring more terrorism, which is good news to the Pentagon and its industrial war-making partners such as Lockheed-Martin, and Big Oil who grease the machinery. It also results in other nations banding together to thwart the SWIFT banking system and to seek ways around the US-controlled reserve currency privileges, such as with BRICS and European alternatives. And, at home, ordinary people are tiring of the continued erosion of the magical middle class, propped up by credit, i.e., domestic microloans, of the which, in its erosion of the buffer zone between Haves and Have-Nots, brings the propertied rich and Ain't-Got-Nothin' poor closer to war, rousing up the populists and leading to the elites to threaten the Bill of Rights.
In the co*k-a-doodle-doo wake up call morning, St. Clair and Cockburn help us take stock of the damage to our culture. Cockburn gave us snapshots in his road 'trip' book, A Colossal Wreck, and we get a taste of his sometimes sardonic Scottish outlook in Orgy. In his brief essay, "America Enters a New Time," Cockburn talks with a barber about the kid who just left the shop,
That's the third boy I've cut today who's headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing: 'There's no work around here and I've got a family to support.'" When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: "Too late. I've signed up."
Join the Army if you fail, as the Dylan lyric goes. It goes on. He describes a Humboldt County, California "where the marijuana boom is in its final paroxysms, with people flocking from around the world to get a piece of the action, just like they did in the Gold Rush." The f*cker ruins our breakfast by telling us: "Millions are plummeting into total destitution, having reached the end of their 99-weeks of unemployment benefits." There's more. Downtown Portland is filled with homeless people, he tells us. Good Folks are robbing banks to pay the mortgage. "Racism is drifting across America like mustard gas in the trenches in World War One." Ursus horribilis, he grizzles.
And St. Clair isn't much better with the news, bring to the fore some of his excellent environmental writing skills to paint a bleak picture. In "The Dollar General Theory of Money and Employment," he suggests that "the rot is metastasizing" and that the proliferation of Dollar General stores is a sign of the dire times:
These stores are replicating across rural America. There are now more dollar stores (50,000 of them by one count) than there are McDonalds and Walmarts combined. They rang up $34 billion sales during the first year of the pandemic, selling crap for a dollar, more or less.
Das Kapital's terminal cancer. St. Clair adds, "The Dollar General Theory is as cruel as it is simple. They want you to work cheap, live cheap and die cheap." In desperation, we bought into Obama's strutting hope-a-dope mantra, only to see him sell out to Wall Street and be rewarded out of office with $400,000 speeches to brokers. More desperate still, we elect the clown car pile-up that was Trump and his administration, as we inched ever so closer to an Idiocracy, as informed by the cartoonish insurrection of January 6. And St' Clair wonders, driving around, what's with everyone flying these MIA black flags?
The neoliberalism Cockburn and St. Clair describe sounds more like a disease, a pandemic, than some idealized formula for universal progress. In these 44 essays, the authors provide a grim assessment of the future for America and Americans -- at home and abroad. Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents is an excellent descriptive title and the book is a must-read catalog of sin in the Age of Godlessness.
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