[lbo-talk] Joseph Massad on US neoliberalism

[Carrol Cox]

I would assume the same is true of Libya & Iran. It is an amazingly 
simple, and even more amazingly accurate, method of judging foreign 
movements and states: what the U.S. supports, we oppose; what the U.S. 
opposes, we support. (US & EU are interchangeable for this purpose. 
There has snot been a single instance, since 1945, in which this crude 
method did not provide the correct assessment of world situations.

It even works when the assumed grounds for the judgment are false. That 
is, there are many grounds for questioning the Monthly Review analysis 
on many occasions. Their attempts to locate a direct economic motive for 
the war on the Vietnamese people were almost risible; their judgment of 
the war was clearly accurate.

Carrol

On 6/21/2011 6:45 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> Moves to limit economic protests and labour strikes are ongoing in 
> Egypt and Tunisia. Once elections are held to bring about a new class 
> of servants of the new order, we will hear that all economic demands 
> should be considered `counterrevolutionary'and should be prosecuted 
> for attempting to `weaken' if not `destroy' the new `democracy'. If, 
> as is becoming more apparent, the US strikes alliances with local 
> Islamist parties, we might even hear that economic protests and 
> opposition to neoliberal imperial economic policies are `against 
> Islam.' The US-imposed `democracy' to come, assuming even a semblance 
> of it will be instituted, is precisely engineered to keep the poor 
> down and to delegitimise all their economic demands. The exchange that 
> the US hopes to achieve by imposing some form of liberal political 
> order on Egypt and Tunisia is indeed more, not less, imperial pillage 
> of their economies and of the livelihoods of their poor classes, who 
> are the large majority of the population. The ultimate US aim then is 
> to hijack the successful uprisings against the existing regimes under 
> the cover of democracy for the benefit of the very same local and 
> international business elites in power under Mubarak and Ben Ali. How 
> successful the US and its local allies will be will depend on the 
> Egyptian and Tunisian peoples.
>
> http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/2011689456174295.html 
>
>
> Joseph Massad who wrote the above essay teaches at Columbia. He might 
> make for a good interview on Behind the News.
>
> The above was also my thought or worry about the Egyptians. But while 
> I was watching, a fair number of those interviewed seemed fully aware 
> of these manipulations by the US and EU.
>
> CG
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