CREDIT CARD WARS
by A COMMENTATOR
Those who witnessed the historic Denver debate between Mitt Romney and US President Barack Obama might have not been allowed to think freely by the media which is busy spinning the tales of who out of the two—Romney or Obama—won the debate. But Obama did make a few honest observations in course of those 95 minutes of debate. At one point Obama eluded that Romney has gone back on the promises he made during 18 months of campaign, especially on his promise to generate US $ 7 trillion worth of finances that includes cutting taxes to the tune of US $ 5 trillion and then investing US $ 2 trillion into the military. Standing against Romney's formula of putting in US $ 2 trillion into the American military, Obama remarked: “We have tried that sales pitch before in 2001 and 2002”, and went on to say—“two wars were paid on credit card” while referring to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
With these comments Barack Obama became the first and highest US political office-bearer to publicly state that the American economic crisis is due to reckless spending in campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan which were a form of investment-generation opportunities for the armed forces of the United States. The tragedy is that as business generation opportunities, they did not succeed in getting trillions more back into the financial system.
Obama's comments on Iraq and Afghanistan will not get highlighted in the so-called mainstream media as the debate was on domestic issues, but when the domestic is so deeply connected to external affairs, then even the domestic issues are of global importance.
Nevertheless, we all stand more enlightened of the dynamics of the United States and it looks like something horribly adventurous went on in the name of attracting investments into the military sector in order to drive a faltering economy. As of now, due to those “credit card type wars”, due to neglect of revenue, and absolute failure of regulation, and not due to some kind of moral degeneration of the American people themselves, the biggest fiscal crisis has descended upon the biggest economy of the world. As a storm in the fulcrum of the world, the massive American economic crisis is also bound to be the core of the international financial crisis.
Now that the American President has confessed before the world and that his country waged wars like they were stacked in vending-machines waiting for credit cards with zero balance, the world will ask: how could this happen? The world should also ask the US: who allowed such reckless and ideology-driven adventures to be launched? Who are responsible for this? Is it George W. Bush? Or was it his predecessor Bill Clinton who flagged off reckless warfare? Or, do the roots of the problem go farther in the history of the US' attitude to be the saviour of the world? Let us look for the answers to Obama's confession ourselves. Nineteen years ago, on January 20, 1993, William Jefferson Clinton took oath of office in Washington D.C. as the 42nd President of the United States. An air of celebration welcomed the new President. The oath came after four days of festivity as the American economy was looking up after the first Gulf War. In the func-tion that preceded the ceremony some of the finest African American singers performed. Bill Clinton was accompanied by Al Gore as the Vice-President. Both were young. Clinton especi-ally had curious similarities with abiding American hero John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy, he was youthful and took over the reins of the country at a time of economic prosperity; then there was the common Catholic touch, and ana-lysts would hint at their common Irish ancestry (Clinton would finally help seal the peace between the IRA and British Government)—the rest of the similarity was looked after by the photographers whose angular frames trans-formed Clinton into a Kennediesque President. Such was the positive vibe and such was the air of achievement and “yes, we can” spirit that Clinton was christened by author Toni Morrison as the first Black President of the United States as he had the typical Black characteristic of being the son of a single mother born in a southern state. Everything was going right for the robust American economy two decades ago, yet, just after two decades, the US is hurled into the gravest crisis that it has ever witnessed in its economy. How did this come about? What went wrong with the confidence and pride that was welcomed with great fanfare in January 1993 as the victor of the Cold War?
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AT the end of the Cold War, conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled ‘End of History'. Around same time, Daniel Bell, another scholar, wrote an essay on ‘End of Ideology'. Both were landmark essays as they tried to highlight the salient features of the phase of history that had just begun after the demise of the USSR—those two essays remain till date the ultimate expression of triumphal declaration of the victory of the variety of history represented in the United States.
If the end of Cold War represented the end of history, then how do we explain the massive historic motions inside the US-led global economy that has ripped apart the ‘End of History' arguments (after all, very few historic events like the current economic crisis of the US, which is being pegged at around US $ 190 trillion, therefore if US $ 190 trillion is not of historic proportion, then what is?). It is apparent that history continues in spite of the likes of Fukuyama.
The end of the Cold War ended the bipolarity of the US-USSR in world affairs and gave away the Soviet claims to radical politics. But it also took away the American claims or pretensions to freedom, genuine radical politics. After all, it is correct that though the Soviet Union provided a state based on orthodox Marxism, it was in the US and France that the real challenge to the liberal state structure rose in the 1960s when the welfare state system was gradually being relaxed to accommodate the new market dynamics of the 1970s.
After the Cold War, the US was the victor and the likes of Fukuyama and Bell welcomed the new emperor with rousing rhetoric but the fact is they were unable to extend the rhetoric of freedom and bring out a more substantial political ideology of the United States.
Was the US to be now led by a radical political agenda or should it be allowed to champion the conservative agenda? After all, it was not clear if the radical political ideology which portrayed American freedom as more radical and equitable than Soviet orthodoxy, helped the US win the Cold War or was it the conservative ideology—of “American finance must have the globe as its playground”—that gave victory on a platter to the US. This debate never took place inside the US after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The other absent debate was about the definition of freedom in the post-Cold War US. Is the Freedom in the US tantamount to “Eat, Drink, Shop”? Should the US then transfer that variety of Freedom as an ideology as it understands in the absence of the Soviet challenge to the world? If Freedom is exported, then will it be a radical project of the 1960s or will it be the one as a national foreign policy objective aimed at benefiting the corporate houses of the US or will it benefit the human beings of those countries? Then as the race riots of the early 1990s in the US brought out: what about the freedom of those people in the US who needed greater voice for themselves? These are some of the questions and debates that did not take place after the Cold War as perhaps the likes of Fukuyama and the rest did not see the need for the victor to have introspection.
(My submission is that the end of the Soviet era demanded the US to change its own orien-tation but vested interests keen on maintaining its arrogance did not allow a broader internal debate of the US to play out.)
Instead of a robust internal debate held in the full view of the international community an air of triumph led the US ideology to the trap of national-corporate climate which basically meant that the US variety of pop ideology was now available for standardisation—one-size-fits-all—which will finally be exported to all those deserving—willing or unwilling. This was the new foreign policy of the superpower. Political change at home be damned. Freedom—“eat, drink, shop”—was to be exported.
It is my argument that the absence of any introspection in the American ideology machine allowed the US to sleep over a review of its own worldview which had been part of two world wars, and then the nuclear arms race and the Cold War with many near-misses of nuclear exchange with the USSR. So I shall argue that the problems of the global economic crisis are in line with the historical problems of Western modernity that created the world wars, cycle of violence and the financial meltdown of the early 20th century. The world has been pushed to the edge at least four times in the last 98 years since the World War II—surprising that the centenary of the World War I is just two years away and history has already returned with full might to the West.
The crisis of modernity—that has been written repeatedly by the likes of Ashis Nandy—connects the wars and the economic crisis of the 20th century with the massive economic blackout of the US in the early 21st century. That the West has slid into a crisis was nearly confirmed when the US won the Cold War without any investigation of the numerous episodes of the Cold War when both sides used monstrous science and modern inventions to the detriment of the human race.
No one in the conservative circle of Fukuyama and Inc ever mentioned if the crimes of the Vietnam era, or the proxy victims of the war crimes of Lebanon, or civil wars of El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile, and East Pakistan, had to be investigated and the guilty be brought to justice. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union was consigned to the dustbin of history and the US was entitled to enjoy heaven on earth—such were the feelings in those heady days before Monica Lewinsky hit the Clinton household.
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BUT then what happens to the long term project of Western values? That project meets a cul-de-sac. In the 19th century, faced with intense criticism over its Dickensian practice of anti-labour policies, and inhuman colonial practice by the trading companies in the East, England did some mid-course correction and brought in a genuine touch of liberal ideas that finally introduced positive changes like education and liberal values which, howesoever unintended, led to the decolonisation movement in countries like India.
At the end of the Cold War, the US needed a leader who would also think of the Western project of liberal values. Instead, they could only think of their financial interest. Neither Bill Clinton nor Obama is that kind of civilisational leader.
But often the thoughtful ones like Toni Morrison have tried to project liberal and “different” American profiles as the face of the redeemer of the American/Western project. The last time such an effort was made finally by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee which is the ultimate recognising authority of all that remains fine in the Western liberal sphere. The Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Husain Obama, the first Black President of the United States, was such an act of recognising the redeemer. But as the last four years showed, the redeemer has come a bit too late for the mid-course correction.
The mid-course correction needed in 1990-91 was not done; instead a cabal of “thinkers” like the ones whose names frequently appear in the pamphlets of neoliberal thesis and conservative politics drove the US for a mid-course acceleration to the same mistakes that various other Western powers of the last 98 years (or even of the late 19th century) committed in their power-drunk days. Looking back, the ideology of “Eat, drink, shop” might be interpreted as “eat, drink, shop, and shop till you die” might have been the only improvisation in the American ideology of the post-Soviet era. That was not an improvisation, it was a sign of ideological stagnation.
The ongoing financial crisis and wars are not limited between the US and Islam but these are reflective of the crisis of a value system that does not ask the vital questions or question like: “Eat, drink, shop till what extent, at what expense, and to what personal or human-philosophical ends?” (or in case of India, “Development for what? To what? To What humane end?”).
If only such a question was asked in 1991 instead of declaring the “end of history” and “end of ideology”, things would have looked different for Barack Obama in 2012. Looking back at 2008, the arrival of Obama as the first Black President of the US appears more like the arrival of an affordable victim to carry the burden of the failure of history, rather than the culmination of the historical processs started by those in the civil rights movement or in the Gandhian freedom struggle of South Asia. Sadly in between those 19 years, figures like George W. Bush did the rest of damage. A lot is being written and also spoken about George W. Bush as the proponent of “credit card wars”. The fact is that with the intellectual acumen of the age in which he was elected, the error of pushing the superpower to the abyss was just the natural outcome.
In fact the Western value system has often looked for saviours and their saviour after a series of wars and massacres appeared to be the United States after the post-Enlightenment states of Europe ended up committing acts of horror from the late 19th to the early 20th century. But there is no system in place in that value system to point out if the Emperor goes without his clothes.
The United States was perceived by the mid-20th century as the saviour of the Western European states that were founded upon the post-Renaissance traditions of Enlightenment. But soon after World War II, the Cold War absorbed the energy of the US and the step-child of Western modernity, USSR.
Disillusionment over industrial civilisation and war that had crept over two world wars had given way to doubts over the way modernity progressed through Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and nuclear rivalry. At the same time, it became clear to many Marxists that there was little Marxist in the behaviour of the Soviet Union. So even though the Soviet Union began by using the slogans of Marx and Engels, it eventually became as reactionary as it was not supposed to have become.
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BUT in its lifetime, the Soviet Union fulfilled another interesting function by opposing total Anglo-Saxon dominance over the world. As far as challenging the dominant discourse of modernity was concerned, the USSR was on the Left of history. When Soviet Union disintegrated, a celebration began in the Liberal Democratic West and out of that celebration came the seeds of the next level of problems. More of it later, but for now, let us rewind and remind ourselves that in the air of celebration of the post-Cold War environs, a youthful Bill Clinton became the President of the US. Bill Clinton was the first President of the globalisation era's US and he celebrated in style. He was the first President who continued with the enemy that the US had discovered in a different form in Tehran and Beirut following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the civil war in Lebanon. There was no great genius involved in re-inventing the enemy of Islam that had indeed been part of the Cold War.
The present economic crisis in the US appears not like the work of individual Presidents but a total collapse of the self-regulatory system (out of a moral and philosophical crisis after 1991). Looking back, even 9/11 and the War on Terror appear like sideshows to the real disaster that was unfolding almost like an inter-generational financial tsunami during the same time—loss of regulation of financial affairs and loss of regulation of military philosophy are therefore interconnected. Among all the incidents of the American history, 9/11 stands out, but the fact is that the 9/11 was spectacular and therefore became a cultural milestone while the financial crisis could not be a spectacular media festival as it could not be seen but can be seen on the streets of American cities like Detroit and Chicago.
Decades and centuries later when history will be written, a much larger financial thermo-nuclear incident will be traced back to the years immediately after the end of the Cold War. A number of people had warned us of the financial disaster that was flowing from the triumphal capitalism of the post-Cold War US. Perils of this economic adventurism based on extreme trade produced a disastrous economic crisis in South-East Asia (1997 to 1999) even before the end of the first post-Cold War decade. India, we were reminded back then by the likes of P. Chidambaram, was insulated from such crisis. But Joseph Stiglitz, inside the Clinton White House, had at that time started ringing the alarm bells of the dangers that were unfolding. By this time, the Cold War had become a distant memory as the episodic encounter between the US and USSR had ended and in the new circumstances an epic encounter between the US and Islam with the cross-border Islamic consciousness as the enemy provided the new reason for “credit card wars”. 9/11 was a major marker in that process of morphing of American ties with the Islamic and Third World countries but it was not a civilisation-changer—the real changer was already underway from 1991 and that was the flow of finance which the world was asked to ignore by the sideshow of “War on Terror” which has been now justifiably described by President Obama as “credit card wars”.
The Interconnection
THE sideshows like ‘War on Terror” have other sideshows that they are accompanied with. One of the sideshows has been “freedom of expression”. The prophet cartoons and video from Los Angeles are such episodic false sideshows to keep the world away from the real problem. Here too the deeper crisis becomes apparent when viewed from the point of view of this piece. The West has justly asked for cessasion of violence in the name of Islam, but to defend a third-rate video film which is supposed to “criticise Islam” in the name of freedom of expression would be a shame. Anyone who has seen the advertisement of the film can say that it was not work or art and even as an act of incitement, it was badly amateurish. Its quality of speech recording was bad, acting was even worse, dialogues were outrageous. In short, even criticisms and taboos must have quality; sadly that video was not one such.
However, serious and thoughtful people have spent hours and days to defend exactly this kind of expression in the name of protecting the values of the Western civilisation. These people should be asked: is “collapse of self-regulation in finance and military philosophy” part of Western liberalism?
For a moment let us look at the Western taboos: the victorious West after World War II did not take kindly to the propaganda and marshal films on German glory made by Leni Reifenstahl of Hitler's Germany. Reifenstahl's films are still screened, only to be studied for her promotion of German glory in an iconic fashion and her films remain an example of grand cinematic projects aimed at building the wall-high image of Germany under the Nazi ruler. Should Reifenstahl's work, which remind us all of the painful memories of the Holocaust, be regarded as an expression of artistic freedom and therefore be screened all over the world by the neo-Nazis? If yes, then perhaps it is alright to screen the cartoons of the Prophet of Islam; if not, then how can the so-called film on Islam be screened on YouTube? If Reifenstahl reminds us of cultural stereoptypes, then are the Prophet film and prophet cartoons not producing same sort of stereotypes for the Muslims/non-Westerns of the world? After all, the hate generated against the Muslims was reflected by the killer of Sikhs in Wisconsin because the shooter of the innocent men and women in Wisconsin were not just Sikhs, they were also mistakenly thought to be Muslims! So what is meant for the Muslims might as well be meant for all those who appear like Muslims or the “Others” before the generic West and in this, the Oriental Others are all clubbed with the Muslims who are being used to express the cultural freedom of the West from Amsterdam, Paris and Los Angeles. Attacking one stereotype production system while allowing another such system also reveals the internal weakness of the West to address the deeper issue. Is it because sections of the West have been challenged psychologically by Islam that the former has to prove its distinctness by basically doing the school-boy antics—that is poke fun at the new guy in the class? The Prophet cartoon is an example of how the West is trying to prove what it is in a superficial way and what a terrible show of bankruptcy the TV show hosts kick up when they speak of the Prophet cartoons and then move on to talk of the pre-ordered IPhone5 as a sign of “eat, drink, shop”.
The contract-bearers of Western civilisation are those who also claim whole proprietorship of freedom of expression. They have not come up with any major works of art, literary classic or arguments, or new political ideas—and all that they have to offer is a 14-minute long trailer of a film which is just not at all an work of art and those who compare it with Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses make the mistake of mixing two different ages, two different contexts and mix the artistic values of a work of literature which became taboo with the so-called film that, besides not being a work of art, certainly is a work of violent incitement. Rushdie's literature in the late 1980s was part of a creative ferment, but to talk of Rushdie in the context of the ongoing crisis in the US and Europe is to club him with the diversionary ploys to hide the real questions.
Therefore the use of “freedom of expression” is also an expression of the deep philosophical crisis that has generated the unspeakable economic crisis. Just imagine, after all that “freedom of expression”, Los Angeles merely produces a video film of 14 minutes!
Behind the issues of films, cartoons, and naked royals in Las Vegas and Paris is the idea of freedom of expression. The question worth asking is this: if the West is really about the FREEDOM of EXPRESSION and if indeed every champion of this freedom has been enjoying this freedom, then where are the great films, the great works of literature, the great works of financial wizardry, and where are the world-changing political ideals? If the part of the world that is known for Montesque, Marx, Rousseau, Einstein and John Stuart Mill is aware of its freedom of expression then why are they not producing answers to the problems of their world instead of the alarmist talk of alternates, sideshows and distractions like Islam and the Arab Spring?
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YES, the West has tried new ideas, but how to create ideas in an order which has become so openly anti-novelty in the name of freedom? In the post-Cold War order, freedom is the name of orthodoxy and not a condition for free creativity. But when it tried for new ideas to run the new system, it tried too long, erred too long, and compromised all too often. For a while, when the first Black President of the United States was elected, it appeared as if the West had a major achievement, but even before the Black President was to prove his difference, he was forced—or perhaps happily proved to be—as violent and vindictive by unleashing drones and by refusing to start a civilisational dialogue. It shows even the Nobel Prize Committee cannot find the solution for the Western liberation dilemma.
The US, the leader of the West apparently, does not want wars to end in the world. The condition of greatness is for the US to agree to perpetual warfare. Then what exactly is the great thing about the West? Simply put, ideas have run out. It seems the Nobel Committee in Stockholm in 2009 was aware of the moral and leadership crisis of the liberal West. The Nobel Prize for President Obama was a sort of coronation of the liberal West's new emperor who epitomises greatness in the West. But then what? The US perhaps has had enough of Obama already, it needs an answer to its problems, not another elected emperor.
The bottomline is that selective use of freedom of expression has brought the West and the rest of the world to this stage, in an age where great ideas are not allowed to flourish and potential great men are left withering a la one Mr Obama. But there is certainly reason for hope. When the world of discourses has become barren and when there is no hope of an alternative, it is then that new ideas flourish. The West is solidly in the middle of a crisis and the “new Rome”, that is, the United States, is in the middle of a storm. For a civilisation that had been built on the concept of market as a social space to grow and govern, the current phase has come as a surprise—the unthinkable has started happening and the US, which triumphed over communism, is creaking and grinding with huge unemployment, and social disturbance knocking on its doors. Just like Barack Obama was not the answer to the crisis, the American election will not generate the answer to the gigantic financial crisis.
Obama and Romney are sparring over US $ 7 trillion. Many homeless Americans out on the streets this winter will know that the election is not over trillions of US dollars, it is over something else that will not be discussed at all—it is about what to do when the “order of things” fail. Sadly, elections are not meant for such moments.
The world is facing not just a crisis that can be dealt in four years. The world centred on the United States is demanding honest discussion of the real problem in the next four years. Chances are, given the dynamics of impoverishment on the streets of the US, history will repeat itself, not as farce, but as tragedy. However, tragedy can also be farcical.