By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
A rising superpower (think China) and a rising group of superempowered individuals (think WikiLeakers) are currently challenging the world system.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/opinion/15friedman.html
He is mistaken about empowerment and super-empowerment. Power just like civilization means struggle. Empowerment means the power-that-be must cede power to its opponent under the threatening pressure of the latter and there is never a victorious power that wants empower voluntarily its opponent. Super-empowerment means the super-power-that-be has lost prestige, influence and hegemony and must cede power to parties that have won struggles and challenged the hegemony. I bet Thomas Friedman has not heard a phrase called “class struggle.” There are transfer, surrender and forfeit of power among classes but never empowerment. Empowerment is a euphemism of defeat on the part of the imperial, aristocratic or other reigning powers.
“There is no America B, so we’d better make this one work a lot better than we’ve been doing, and not only for our sake. When Britain went into decline as the globe’s stabilizing power, America was right there, ready to pick up the role. Even with all our imperfections and mistakes, the world has been a better place for it. If America goes weak, though, and cannot project power the way it has, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world. You will not like who picks up the pieces. Just glance at a few recent headlines.”
He is wrong again. There is no thousand-year Reich, as Herr Hitler wished, in the real world. Every nation-state has a plan-B just in case. What does the U.S.B. look like? How would the U.S.A. transform into an U.S.B.?
The bourgeois politicians at the behest of their paid-for masters are so pompous that they look down upon people as a bunch of cogs of the electoral machine, valets of the business and marionettes for the faux democracy. They figure that people have nowhere else to go than staying put in the store that offers under-valued, stagnated wages and hopeless future for both themselves and their descendants. The anti-revolutionary UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called it TINA (There Is No Alternative.) She and her reactionary pal - Ronald Reagan were dead wrong about people’s determination to seek a brilliant future.
Global overproduction has debilitated its production system – monopoly capitalism to such a degree that has brought capitalism to its knees. Even the BRIC countries feel the pain of overproduction, let alone the developed economies. Overproduction leads to underinvestment and unemployment hence under-demand or over-accumulation and glut of capital in the form of money, factory, raw material and others. As a result, the Era of World Great Stagnation has finally firmed its foothold.
The easy way out of it is to strengthen one’s own export and shift the misfortune onto someone else; but the dilemma is that someone wants to do the same onto others too as quickly as possible. A global trade deadlock is therefore bidding its time. The export strategy is doomed to fail except for the BRIC countries that maintain temporarily cheap labor cost advantage. It is not certain that Germany can sustain its machine-engineering export and for how long before the renovation-minded BRIC will stop it. Besides, as their economies are prone to inflation, their currencies tend to devaluation relative to the USD so that US export will have less competitive advantage than theirs. The Federal Reserve has announced it wants to accelerate workings of the printing press to inflate out opponents’ advantage of inflationary policy. An inflationary scuffling among the economic players seems unavoidable. The motivation is obviously to shift the misfortune of economic calamity to the shoulders of the working and middle classes in every country.
It is a fact that the immediate and most gravely affected by any economic slump - whether stagnation, deflation or inflation - are always the working people.
The brave new world is a world by, of and for the finance capital that takes advantages of the differences between the free-moving capital and hampered movement of labor across the globe. The implications are simply that the advanced countries are de-industrialized and racing to the bottom and the developing countries are currently industrialized in a most modern way and stagnated in wages for a longtime.
The world enters its stage of reckoning and the struggle between capital and labor is about to step up to a new high since the end of WW II.
The only way to avoid economic calamities is to overthrow the system that rules the old U.S.A. and welcome the newly born U.S.B.