Dec 9, 2008
Al-Ahram
New York Times columnist Frank Rich's recent description of Washington as a "liberated city" is perhaps hyperbole. But many governments and peoples around the world are clearly in something of a state of euphoria, as though a dark cloud has been dispelled or they are about to be released from chains.
Certainly I, along with many colleagues and fellow citizens, have been feeling this way. Eight long years of misery, wretchedness, death and destruction, and uninterrupted brazen lying brought on by the neoconservative clique in Washington are nearing an end. In the eyes of millions, the Bush administration's arrogance, its unjustifiable tampering with their lives, and the degradation and torture that its imperialist project is also responsible for, the global economic crisis for which they will probably have to pay an additional exorbitant price in the coming years, during which the forthcoming Obama administration may not help or even apologise to those who fell in the face of the repression meted out by the Bush regime, hope is strong in a new dawn.
Unlike many leaders in Europe and Asia, most of us in the Arab world may not and will probably never admit that we have been lax in protecting our sovereignty and that we had encouraged Bush to contribute to exacerbating the gap between our rich and our poor. We yielded almost without question to pressures to deregulate trade and release free market forces, turning individual and family enterprises into monsters under the illusion that the new capitalism heralded by the Bush clique was the pinnacle of human evolution if not paradise on earth, albeit a paradise that required a massive security cordon. The survival and prosperity of the security forces and agencies that made up this cordon depended upon perpetuating the terrorist alarm, sounding it loud enough to wage full-scale wars in its name. Today, some of us still believe, like Bush, that the remedy to the great recession that has set in resides in the very ill that brought it on -- that an even greater dose of rampant savage capitalism will rescue the US, Europe and dozens of economies elsewhere from unemployment, personal insecurity and social instability.
Thus, increasingly frequent forecasts that people will continue to behave in destructive and self- destructive ways. The powers that be in political, economic and security affairs have succeeded over the years in instilling certain attitudes conducive to the philosophy and practice of the capitalist jungle. It would be naïve to imagine that people despairing of the lack of alternatives or stunned by successive blows of the economic crisis will give up patterns of thought and behaviour into which they have been indoctrinated through various methods of persuasion or coercion. Not many will readily relinquish the drive to make as much money possible, as quickly as possible, with the least effort as possible regardless of the means. This is one of the reasons why I take no issue with the view that the past few years brought a zenith in corruption and organised crime, both of which show no signs of abating. Nor do I disagree with the opinion that it is naïve to believe that the people who made inconceivable fortunes and attained enormous power through these means will now turn a new leaf and contribute to the reforms needed to remedy and prevent the reoccurrence of the crisis they instigated or enter into a new social contract that strikes a saner balance between the greed of a minority and the needs of the majority.
It is no coincidence that the Bush era that ushered in a resounding deterioration in US power and prestige was also an era that had nothing but scorn and contempt for culture and intellectuals, and that now the US finds itself on the threshold of the virtual opposite, an era that will open sensitive political and economic positions to members of the intelligentsia. Nor is it odd that the Republicans based their campaign around slogans and figures that could not have been further removed from university campuses that were the bastions of resistance against everything the Bush administration stood for, against all those values and practices that betrayed unfathomable depths of ignorance, stupidity and inexperience. The Republicans chose John McCain in spite of his meagre political and legislative accomplishments and they chose as his running mate a woman who wasn't quite sure whether Africa was a state or a continent, yet whose political rival, whose name and reputation she set out to destroy, had African origins and knew more about Africa than she knew about anything.
Meanwhile, the Obama camp, which was focussed on what it would take to halt American decline, realised that massive reserves of American intellectual and scientific energies would need to be mobilised towards reviving the US's prestige abroad, salvaging the US and global economy, refurbishing American infrastructure, mending the discrepancies in US social relations and bringing a rampant capitalist order to heel in tamer, more equitable pastures. Obama's task will be far from easy. He will inherit from Bush an arsenal of imperial instruments and laws that have rendered the occupant of the White House more powerful, domestically, than ever before and that have rendered US citizens unprecedentedly vulnerable to the abuse of their civil liberties and rights of privacy. For Obama and his team to renounce this legacy will demand superhuman will. But if he fails to do so, many of his campaign pledges will remain precisely that: ink on paper and propaganda. Unless his administration tables urgent and immediately feasible plans and programmes to reverse Bush's disastrous train of mistakes, I suspect that leaders in Europe, Russia, China, Brazil, India and elsewhere will espouse ultranationalist economic attitudes and policies on the grounds of protecting the remnants of their industry and agriculture that have not been decimated by stagnation.
Such a development has occurred before. Following the 1929 stock market crash in the US, the US Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act introducing very high customs duties on a number of imports. Today we might see the break up of regional and international economic blocs that could not withstand the onslaught of the crisis and the rise, instead, of different types of economic groups, more in the nature of mutual economic defence fortresses than associations intended to promote economic openness, integration, investment and trade. It would not be a surprise to see the tangential growth of more extremist political and religious trends than those that accompanied the tide of globalisation. One can picture, for example, movements to fortify nations against the "pirates of stagnation" who spread corruption and purchase consciences, stir up civil strife and engage in the trade of the unemployed and the desperate for food, shelter and clothing.
We are nearing the end of the Bush "ideology" which hundreds of economists and politicians had warned would wreak havoc. I recall warnings as early as 2003 of the possible collapse of the international credit market as the consequence of the neoconservatives' economic leadership and that this collapse would precipitate a train of major bankruptcies. Deaf to these warnings, Bush and his den of economic hacks stuck to their mumbo jumbo about the ability of the market to rectify itself. They simultaneously stymied all contributions to economic thought and practice by disciples of the schools of Marx, Keynes and Galbraith who otherwise might have been able to warn the heads of banks, international financial institutions and ministries of economic planning and finance of the immanent collapse and to advise them on measures to take to avert disaster or at least to stem the fallout. In all events the crisis erupted and, as was also expected, rescue efforts focussed on saving one side and not the other. Money was poured in to save the creditor and not the debtor, in spite of the integral relation between the two. But that type of blindness is typical of the "Bushist" take on the crisis, which also now seems to be the approach of Arab governments and media, and according to which this is all merely a glitch that has been blown out of proportion and that all that is now required is a few injections of cash into banks to make it go away.
* The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research