Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The corruption game

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The corruption game

by Juan Cole from Asia Times Online.

This liberal US intellectual is quite willing to point out all the "blunders" (crimes) of US foreign policies that support corrupt, anti-democratic governments, but sees them as only mistakes that do not serve "US interests"--interests which he never spells out. This kind of analysis is as far left that acceptable left discourse is allowed to stray in US intellectual circles. Here are some good illustrations:

It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The US receives no real benefits from its damaging association with them.
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As usual when Washington backs corrupt regimes in the name of its "war on terror", democracy suffers and things slowly deteriorate.
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Here's a simple rule of thumb in such situations: bad policy creates even worse policy. The Obama administration's mistake in ramping up its Afghan war left it needing ever more supplies, worrying about perilous supply lines through Pakistan, and so vulnerable to transit blackmail by the ruling kleptocracies of Central Asia. When their populations, too, explode into anger, the likely damage to US interests could be severe.
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...US backing [of corrupt regimes] has a significant probability of boomeranging sooner or later. Elites, confident that they will retain such backing as long as there is an al-Qaeda cell anywhere on the planet, tend to overreach, plunging into cultures of corruption and self-enrichment so vast that they undermine economies, while producing poverty, unemployment, despair, and ultimately widespread public anger.

What is never discussed are the contradictions between more democratic or legitimate governments and US interests. He concludes his essay with this absurd statement:

It's time for Washington to signal a new commitment to actual democracy and genuine human rights by simply cutting off military and counter-terrorism aid to authoritarian and corrupt regimes that are, in any case, digging their own graves.