Let's get one thing straight. There's no such thing as ABB. There's only EON - "End the Oiligarchy Now" - committed resistance to the US Empire in word, thought and deed. Booting Shrub out will accelerate this process, that's all. This isn't the only political battle of the 21st century; ultimately we're going to have to build a Left capable of challenging Euro/Asiacapital on is own turf. But the only way to get there from here is by getting rid of the oil gangsters.
I write:
IMO this is the soundest argument that one can possibly muster in support of Kerry, because it has the merit of focusing on the big picture of the unfolding world-historical situation: the inevitable decline of the imperial US, and the utterly crucial dialectic between a) how US ruling groups respond to that inevitable decline and b) the ability of progressive forces inside and _especially_ outside the US to respond to the responses of US ruling groups.
However, I have (at least) three quibbles with the way in which DRR has framed the world-historic situation:
1) It is by no means entirely clear that a putatively "liberal internationalist" administration would have reacted to suddenly rising threats to US seignorage privileges and the shock of 9-11 through a qualitatively different foreign policy than the Bushites, i.e. through a trilateralist policy of "gracefully managed decline,"
2) That the Bushites have immeasurably weakened US dominance further limits the capacity of a would-be Kerry Administration to return to the Washington Consensus model of world geopolitical management (evidenced most obviously by Kerry's vow not to "cut and run" from Iraq for fear of damaging the imperial US' "credibility"),
3) The looming end of cheap oil, catastrophic climate change on the near horizon, and other manifestations of global ecological crisis very possibly preclude the baton being handed off to the EU or East Asia or whomever ... the steel-cage death match between international socialism or barbarism (which of course already afflicts vast numbers in the Global South) will arrive with full force before any kind of "normal" hegemonic transition between, say, the US and the PRC, occurs.
Nothing better captures the wholesale idiocy and the sheer decadence of the US ruling class than the present irrelevant pissing match between the Kerry and Bush campaigns. It is well past the eleventh hour for US imperial decline and two factions of the ruling class are wholly preoccupied with petty electoral advantage.
John Gulick Knoxville, TN
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