Freitag, 27. Januar 2017

Making America great again or globalisation is coming home.

Now that Donald Trump is President he will start showing his real agenda soon. It might be erratic and sometimes muddled by incompetence, but the overall agenda  that I would assume we will see in his presidency, I call “globalisation is coming home”. It will be the final drive to enrich the richest (and Trump himself) on the backs of American workers.

When I say globalisation, I am speaking about the neoliberal policies as first tested after the CIA backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile by Augusto Pinochet and his “Chicago Boys” in 1973. There has always been a difference in neoliberalism at home and outside the USA where it was imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. The template for this outside totalitarian, exploitative form of neoliberalism first implemented in chile, that did away with unions, left resistance, civil society, environmental protection and democracy, was much more vicious than capitalism at home in the US. With Trump I suspect, this migt not be the case much longer.

“Making America great again” if I understand Trump correctly, will mean “bringing home” the jobs from Mexico, Bangladesh or Indonesia to the US, and compete internationally with the abysmal wages, non existent environmental protection and poor working conditions in those “offshore” countries. Even “Developing the infrastructure to create jobs” has always been an important part of this strategy for exploitation, as those infrastructure projects vastly benefited those US companies that build them, left the countries in staggering debts and did not help the people at all. (click)

This neoliberal globalisation was the successful strategy to export those drastic forms of exploitation, that (even) Americans would not accept, to the countries that could be bullied to do so. If he can, if nobody stops him, Trump will do away with any workers or left resistance, with free press, with environmental protection and the last remnants of social equality, welfare and democracy, just as the US by proxy of the World Bank and the IMF did in the developing world since the 70s.

So Trumps “protectionism” will not bring the end of “globalisation”, it will bring it home, imposing the most vicious strategies of globalisation onto the American people. Under Trump, Americans will be feeling the hurt that was inflicted on so many others in their name for decades. In this, Trumps presidency might be more honest in many ways than any of the previous decades presidencies. From the outside looking at America, Trump may thus just be the President that America needs to understand what neoliberal globalisation was all about.

I hope that the american people learn this lesson fast. If they do, many examples exist how to organize and fight this. Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and many others, showed the world what it takes to get rid of the totalitarian overseers of corporate imperialism and fascism. For the american people, and the rest of the world, I hope that this will be the final result of Trumps presidency,

Suggested reads:
Naomi Klein: "The Shock Doctrine"
Noam Chomsky: "Profit over People"

Suggested Link for those that want to resist: "Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies"