[lbo-talk] New Libyan Prime Minister is U.S. Citizen

[ken hanly]

   I would think the trend is more toward integration into global capitalism. Libya was opening to Chinese as well as Western European U.S. and Canadian investment especially in oil. In Libya the U.S. was simply part of a larger interventionist group comprised mostly of European former colonial powers. Gadaffi did cooperate with foreign capital to help develop oil resources for example but the state still had a huge role, and took a much greater percentage of the revenue than for example the U.S. or Canada gains from oil companies. As I have mentioned many times  development took place through PSA's. The terms of these PSA's had been changed by Gadaffi to give the government an even greater cut something that did not sit well with the oil companies.
     European and North American oil companies are no doubt hoping that the NTC will favor them over Russian and Chinese oil companies since the latter did not really support the rebels from the start. Canada can now continue building the new prison that they had contracted under Gadaffi. No doubt the NTC can use it.
    The U.S. intervenes to try to give U.S. companies an advantage and also to try and control events within the country in the interests of international capital. The point is not that Libya was not open to international capital but that the rebellion offered an opportunity for others to come to power who would provide more favorable conditions for capital. Of course they may be wrong. In Iraq the U.S. hoped to have an oil law in place that would allow much better conditions for oil companies than what exists now that is PSA's -except in Kurdistan. The oil law was a benchmark of progress during the Bush administration. There is still no oil law.

Cheers, ken
   
 

________________________________
From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 8:05:28 AM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] New Libyan Prime Minister is U.S. Citizen

SA: "Most governments in the world have been trending towards
neoliberalism over the last 30 years."

[WS:] Good point, indeed.  Most of that trending comes from within
these countries, rather than from the US interventions.  It seems that
there is little causal connection between the two.

That leaves us with two questions:

1. What are the causes of trending toward neoliberalism?
2. Why does the US intervene, if the countries are trending toward
neoliberalism anyway?

My answer to #1 is, surprise surprise, sea changes in the class
structure.  More specifically, the growing power of the
techno-managerial class.  There is an elective affinity between this
socio-economic class an neo-liberalism.

My answer to #2 is a bit more complex and it involves a peculiar
structure of the US political institutions.  To make a long story
short - this structure is designed to constrain government initiative
through byzantine edifice of "checks and balances."  There is however,
one exception - foreign policy, especially military interventions that
fall short of full blown wars.  The POTUS has considerable discretion
in this area, which means that he can do it at a rather low political
cost vis a vis acting in the domestic spheres.  And since there is
little political cost of overseas military interventions, there is
also a temptation to do it for appears to be trivial reasons.

To put it in another perspective - for the general public war looks
like the last resort action after less serious measures failed.  It is
so, in a big part, because the cost of war is very high to the general
public and measured in the lives of relatives and friends as well as
other sacrifices.  On the other hand, the reverse is true for the
POTUS due to the peculiar, and I may add idiotic, nature of the US
political institutions, under which domestic interventionism is far
more costly in terms of political capital than foreign
interventionism.

To sum it up, the US intervenes overseas mainly because it can do it
at a relatively little political cost, so it does it for quite trivial
reasons that would not qualify as a "legitimate" casus belli in the
popular discourse.

Wojtek
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