BW worries about GWB

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Mar 16 14:29:32 PST 2003


Justin: ``So I don't see BW as saying, damn, too bad they couldn't sell this great policy! Bur rather, a policy this disruptive is bad for the interests of the business community for which we speak...''

Thomas: ``This is an important point to consider. Many on the left tend to see an identity between Big Business and government. First, this presupposes that the bourgeoisie is a monolith, and has one vision. Second of all, it doesn't see the field of politics as having any separate rules of play from that of the bourgeoisie. It's quite a vulgar, simplistic way of looking at the world...''

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You're both right. I am too far gone into hate and rage at these pigs to read them clearly.

On Thomas's point, I see the government currently filled with so many business people, that it has essentially adopted a business culture as its general outward demeanor, its internal system of relations, its centers of interest, and the basic thrust of its policies. Hence my reading that the problem with Bush's war on Iraq is bad marketing---were marketing and diplomacy are interchangeable. In my twisted mind this means that they no longer understand politics outside of a business mentality.

But then these points go to Bruce Nussbaum's division. How can a government devoted to multilateral and multinational business interest pursue a one sided disruptive war? In other words let's get back to a better for business foreign policy strategy.

Clearly then bourgeois disaffection with Bush is based on Nussbaum's worries, namely bad for the multilateralism of international business. Bad for the basic neoliberal project.

Okay. But this forgets that the politics of business is based on brutal competition that aims at domination and monopoly. In other words it's game isn't the politics of multilateral cooperation. So then the Bush administration's mistake is to take the petty business ethic of competition and domination into the foreign policy arena. That is the US has adopted the methods and techniques of the market as its foreign policy and decided that current Iraq regime must go---not as a political adversary, but much like a run down corporation ready for a take over---where weaker is better. Once Iraq is subsumed into the US corporate body, it can be re-modeled for use as a penetrating platform into the Islamic world, much like a retail outlet in a bad neighborhood.

Well, rambling... trying to understand the internal logic...

Chuck Grimes



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