War by Other Means

[chlamor]

War by Other Means

by Stephen Gowans

While the soft coups differ in their details, the basic structure is fairly clear. The aim is to take advantage of the political openness of the target country, using its multi-party structure and civil liberties, to build a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition to challenge the government in the context of a multi-party election, which, weeks before it is held, will be denounced as fraudulent or unfair, in accordance with a predetermined script. Allegations of electoral fraud forms the basis for mass protests and civil disobedience, aimed at discrediting the government and forcing its resignation.

The successor government, comprising principal members of the opposition, usually selected by Western governments or their agents, is invariably pro-Western and pro-investment, and, having climbed to power on a ladder bought and paid for by Western imperialism, sets about discharging its obligations to its benefactors by overhauling the economy to mortgage it to Western banks and corporations. The parliamentary opposition, activist youth groups and pro-opposition media, angelized as "democratic" and "independent" in the Manichean manner of these operations, operates on lavish budgets furnished by such pro-imperialist organizations as the Soros, Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations and imperialist governments and their agencies, including the US National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. These foundations and agencies claim to be in the business of promoting democracy and civil society abroad, but exist to promote parties and movements sympathetic to advancing the financial and economic interests of Western capital. It's no surprise that one of the first orders of business of the newly installed Democratic Opposition of Serbia, swept to power by US-backed youth activists who challenged the first round of the post-terror bombing elections in Yugoslavia, in which the Socialist candidate Slobodan Milosevic came second, and was due to advance to a run-off, was to begin the process of dismantling Serbia's socially-owned economy and putting it up for sale.

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The treatment of US oil companies also lies at the heart of Washington's recently lecturing Moscow over democratic back-sliding. The stern lectures, designed to lend the appearance of having sprung from a moralistic commitment to democracy, are nothing more than complaints about Russia losing some of its allure as an attractive place for US corporations and investors to do business. The problem is that while the Putin government still welcomes foreign investment, it has moved to keep "some strategic industries . under state control," (New York Times, April 26, 2005) industries US investors and shareholders would like to dominate. For anyone who cares to look, it's not too difficult to find the economic and financial stakes that lurk behind Rice's claptrap about democracy. She talks of "pressure" being brought to bear on Russia "to open its economy"; suggests that Russia "needs to get rid of inconsistencies," in its "treatment of foreign oil companies" (which we can take to mean US oil companies especially, if not wholly); and echoes "rising complaints by American companies over canceled contracts for exploration and production, and over curbs under Mr. Putin on foreign majority ownership in oil exploration" (New York Times, April 20, 2005.) Going to bat for "American oil companies that . have been barred from taking part fully in oil and natural gas ventures in Russia," Rice complains about "Russian decisions to cancel foreign roles in energy exploration and to impose new roles allowing foreign oil companies to take only minority positions in partnership with Russian investors." (New York Times, April 21, 2005.) When the former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, eager to push through the US-designed shock therapy program that would finalize the demolition job begun by Mikhail Gorbachev in tearing down the socialist pillars of the old Soviet economy and erecting a new privatized, for-profit economy, ordered an artillery bombardment to deal with opposition to the plan, there were no stern lectures from Washington about backsliding on democracy. This can be attributed to the reality that for Washington, London, Bonn and Paris, the trinity of democracy, liberty and human rights are simply the pleasant sounding words that cover another trinity: rent, profit and interest.

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The absorption of previously planned and publicly owned economies into the imperialist orbit, and the destruction of programs of reform aimed at reducing the desperation of the target country's population (land reform programs, for example), provides investors and shareholders in the metropolis with expanded opportunities to employ desperate people at desperation-level wages under insufferable working conditions, drawing from an inexhaustible pool of even more desperate people. Were economies national and self-sufficient this might have no material consequences for the population of the imperialist countries. But economies are not national and self-sufficient; they have, on the contrary, long ago been integrated, by imperialism, into one world economy. As a consequence, a competition of all against all, for jobs and industry, intensifies with each planned and publicly owned economy that falls, with each program of reform that is quashed by the demands of absentee investors and shareholders. The opening of new labor markets and the continued desperation of black Africans relegated by the history of colonialism to live grim lives on arid soil, and therefore to become an inexhaustible source of fresh low-wage labor for corporations looking to fatten their bottom lines by employing desperate people at progressively lower wages, reverberates through the West. The implications for labor in the metropolis are already fully manifest in Western Europe, in growing downward pressure on wages, intensifying upward pressure on the length of the working day, the progressive dismantlement of the welfare state, and obstinately high levels of unemployment.

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/GOW505A.html