The big difference between those foreign adventures and the great confrontations which forged the modern United States, such as the Civil War and the two world conflicts, is that "local", expeditionary operations as the Iraq conquest are waged without putting the nation's economy on a war footing. Instead business is kept going as usual in order not to make people at large feel the military and fiscal burden of the aggressive policy. President George W Bush's famous advice to his citizens after 911, while launching the War on Terror, was to go shopping.
THE KEEPERS OF THE STATUS QUO
There is no doubt that Washington is again confronted with the inevitability of drastic tax increases, particularly on the richest sections of the populations which have had a virtually free ride since the adoption of Reaganomics, preceded by the Thatcher reforms in Britain. As a corollary, the inevitable and predictable effect of "supply side" economics have been the pauperization of the weakest sections of "liberal" societies: blue collar workers, unwed mothers, temporary employees, working class pensioners and the accelerating decline of the middle classes.
The much needed reversal of those "slash and burn" policies carried out in the name of "economic efficiency", amounting to the removal of remaining barriers to the growth of the great fortunes, is and will be fiercely resisted by the beneficiaries of the neo-liberal regime who have immensely increased their wealth and power in the last three decades. The elite that sits at all commands and controls in the USA and to a large extent in London too is made up of the overlapping castes of Wall Street investment and merchant bankers, weapons manufacturers, energy tycoons, high officials of the Treasury, Federal Reserve Board members from the entourage of the fathers of the Neo-Liberal revolution, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin,. Jon Corzine, Lloyd Blankfein, many of them trained and built up in the Goldman Sachs "financial yeshiva" or in the Lazard, JPMorgan Chase and other leading banking concerns and related insurance companies like Hank Greenberg's AIG.
Most have cultural and ideological affinities with the mentors of the Neo-Conservative movement, Irving and William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and with others who are less noted for their convictions but belong to the same fraternity like current World Bank Chairman Robert Zoellig, IMF's Chair Dominique Strauss-Kahn and "free electrons" gravitating within the system, whether we refer to the investment manager and "guru" George Soros, to the Canadian liquor kings the Bronfmans, to the Media Kings the Newhouses or to the now discredited former Chairman of the NASDAQ, Bernard Madoff. The nebula's arms embrace the globe and one of its major achievements was the adoption and enforcement in many countries of the so-called Chicago Consensus, based on the rather extreme theories of Milton Friedman.
That caste of global financial lords, pundits and ideologues, extending its control to the all important media and entertainment sphere, whether in outspokenly liberal but "politically correct" Hollywood or in the public relations firms where "perceptions are shaped", is linked by a common loyalty to an ultra-liberal agenda (sometimes mitigated by some apparent social concerns) and it has a network of associates, partners and agents in all important countries. Prominent among those are the Russian oligarchs who used the support of their backers in North America, Western Europe and Israel to take control of critical sectors of the Soviet economy during the latter's breakup. They have since lost some of their power because of the rising power of the Russian State which tends to take a dim view of their speculative methods, monopolistic goals and pro-western positions. One of the US's favorites, Mikhail Khodorkovski has been in jail for the last few years after being convicted on several counts of fraud and tax evasion while Boris Berezovski lives in exile in Britain to escape arrest in his land of birth. Another tycoon, Abramovich made his peace with the Kremlin but also resides in England.
Some books have recently attempted to connect some of the apparently loose strands which make up the "global financial-ideological" fabric. For instance "The Transparent Cabal" by Professor Steven Sniegoski, "Guilt by Association" by Jeff Gates, an ex-Counsel to the US Senate's Finance Committee and Murray Friedman's "The Neo-Conservative Revolution, Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy" - which, contrary to the earlier two books, is highly supportive of the movement he describes - are works that provide a wealth of information on the interconnections and synergies that keep such apparently different worlds as Wall Street, Hollywood as well as Media Lords, Capitol Hill Legislators, top-ranking diplomats, Pentagon bureaucrats and lobbyists and Israeli politicians on both the right and left aisles of the spectrum working together, in spite of superficial differences.
Gates makes a very important point in his book and in his website www.criminalstate.com when he observes that the cabal that effectively rules the US relies on "a very advanced knowledge of game theory". That accounts for the fact that (captive) opposition is systematically included and promoted in the strategy in order to present token alternatives while in fact letting the master plan unfold, thus serving the overall objectives. Eminent watchers of the US scene like Emmanuel Todd indeed have concluded that there are no serious divergences between the two "opposing" parties in the USA.
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