Imperialist Recovery: Spending Trillions of Dollars on Wars for Israel, Not Social Welfare and Higher Wages for American Workers By James Petras Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, June 4, 2018

The Iraqi City of Mosul

 

Imperial Recovery and Disappearing Workers

Introduction

Nero played his fiddle, Obama shot baskets and Trump twittered while their
empires burned.

What makes empire decay and what makes empires expand has everything to do
with their relations between rulers and the ruled. Several factors are decisive. These
include: (1) rent, land and housing, (2) the direction of living standards, (3) the rise or fall
of mortality rate, (4) decline or rise of families.

Throughout history rising empires incorporate their population to the task of
empire by distributing a portion of their plunder to their masses, by providing them with
land, low rents and housing. Large scale landlords facing returning young war veterans
reduced excessive land concentration to avoid domestic unrest.

Rising empires raised living standards, as salaried employees, workers and
artisans, merchants and scribes found employment as the oligarchies expanding
conspicuous consumption and expanded the state bureaucracy running the empire.
A prosperous empire is cause and consequence of increases in families, and the
growth of healthy and educated plebeians who serviced and served the rulers.

In contrast, declining empires plunder the domestic economy; concentrated
wealth as the expense of the labor force, heedless of the diminution of its health and life
expectancy. As a result deteriorating empires experience a declining rate of mortality;
homeownership and land is concentrated in an elite of renters living off of unearned
wealth via inheritance, speculation, rents which degrades productive work based on skill
and knowledge.

Declining empires are cause and consequence of deteriorating families composed
of opioid addicted workers suffering from rising inequalities between rulers and ruled.
The US imperial experience over the past century embodies the trajectory of the
rise and fall of empires. The past quarter century describes the relations between rulers
and ruled at a time of declining empire.

Living standards of Americans have decline precipitously. Employers have
ceased paying for pensions; reduced or eliminated health coverage ; reduced corporate
taxes thus lowering the quality for public education.

Over the past two decades, wages and salaries for the majority of households have
stagnated or declined; education and health expenses bankrupting many and reducing
university graduates to long-term debt peonage.

Accessibility to home ownership for Americans under 45 years has fallen
dramatically from 24% in 2006 to 14% in 2017. At the same time, rents have
skyrocketed especially in large cities across the country, in most cases absorbing between
a third and half of monthly income.

Business elites and their housing experts divert attention to “intergenerational’
inequalities between pensioners and younger wage and salaried employees instead of
reconizing rising inequalities between CEO and both workers and pensioners which have
risen from 100 to 400 to one over the past three decades.

Mortality rates between the business elite and workers have widened as the
wealthy live longer and healthier lives while workers have experienced declining life
expectancy, the first time in American history! As the business elites income from
profits, dividends, interest increase they can afford high cost private medical care,
prolonging life, while millions of workers are prescribed death inducing opioids, to
‘reduce pain’ and precipitate premature death.

Births are declining as a result of the high cost of medical care, the absence of day
care and paid maternal or paternal leave. The most recent studies revealed that 2017
experienced the fewest babies in 30 years. The so-called “economic recovery’ following
the financial collapse of 2008/9 was class based: the real estate and financial elites
received over two trillion dollars in bailouts while over 3 million working class
households were evicted by financial mortgage holders. The result was a rapid rise in
homeless people especially in cities with the highest rate of recovery from the crises.
Homelessness and crowded overpriced rentals and minimum wages are likely
causes of declining birthrates and increasing mortality rates.
Imperialism Expands, Living Standards Decline

Unlike the earlier, post WWII decades in which overseas expansion was
accompanied by low cost higher education, accessible low cost mortgages and increasing
home ownership, and employer paid pensions and health coverage, over the past two
decades imperial expansion is based on forced reductions of living standards.
The empire grew and living standards declined because the capitalist class evaded
trillions of taxable income via overseas tax havens, transfer pricing and tax exemptions.
Moreover, capitalists received massive state subsidies for infrastructure, and cost-free
transfers of public funded technological innovations.

Imperial expansion now is based on the relocation of multi-national
manufacturing corporations overseas to lower labor costs, increasing the percentage of
low wage service workers in the US .

The decline of living standards for the majority is a result of the restructuring of
the empire, the advent of the regressive tax system, the redistribution of State welfare
transfers from public social spending to private finance and real estate subsidies and
bailouts.

Conclusion

In the beginning, imperialism involved an explicit social contract with labor:
overseas expansion shared profits, taxes and income with labor in exchange for workers
political support for imperial overseas economic exploitation, resource plundering as well
as serving in the imperial armed forces .

The social contract was conditioned by a relative balance of power: unionized
workers represented the majority of manufacturing, public sector and skilled workers.
But this balance of power in class relations was based on the capacity of labor to engage
in class struggle and influence the state. In other words the entire imperialism and
welfare configuration was based on a particular set of conditional relations intrinsic to the
social pact.

Over time imperial expansion faced overseas constraints from rising national and
socialist opposition which forced or encouraged corporations it to relocate capital abroad.
Imperial rivals in Europe and Asia competed for overseas markets forcing the US to
increase productivity, lower labor costs, relocate abroad or reduce profits. The US chose
to reduce domestic living standards and relocating abroad.

Labor unions divorced from the broader community movements and lacking an
independent political movement, corrupted from within and committed to a disappearing
social compact, declined in number and capacity to formulate a new combatative post
social pact strategy. The capital class gained total control over class relations and,
therefore, unilaterally set the terms of taxation, employment, living standards and, most
important, state expenditure.

Imperial military and economic expenditures grew in direct proportions to the
decline of social welfare payments. Rival power groups fought over the share of capitalist
budgets and political-military priorities. Economic imperialists competed with or
converged with military imperialists; free market neo-liberals competed for overseas
markets with national militarists pursuing territorial occupations, conquests, closed
markets and submissive clients. Rival political power configuration competed over
imperial priorities – powerful Zionists configurations sought regional wars for Israel
while multi-nationals looked to advance their political-economic expansion in Asia –
China, India and Southeast Asian markets.

Competing elite factions monopolized budgets, taxes and expenditures driving
labor living standards downward. Imperialist classes formed pacts – but only among
themselves – but the quality and quantity of workers decreased – through impoverished
health care and, educational systems. In contrast Elite offspring attended the best
schools and secured the highest posts in government and economy.

Privilege and power did not produce imperial triumphs. China harnessed
educational programs and skilled workers to productive work.In contrast privileged US
university graduates sought employment in parasitical lucrative financial positions not in
science, engineering and social welfare.Military academy graduates joined networks of
‘commanders’ who condoned sexual abusers, trained and promoted officers who sent
missiles which targeted military bases and bombed population centers and trained naval
captains specializing in own- ship collisions.

Ivy League graduates secured high government positions leading the US into endless
Middle East wars, multiplying adversaries, antagonizing allies and spending trillions on
wars for Israel, not social welfare and higher wages for American workers . Oh yes the
‘economy’ is recovering…. only the people are doing worse.

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