USA: Die aufstrebende Rove-Republik

--- Die neokonservative Agenda der Bush-Administration steht mal wieder zur Debatte. Der Agonist macht seine Kritik dieses Mal am Oberspindoktor im Weißen Haus, an Bush-Berater Karl Rove, fest und hat in einem längeren Aufsatz einige Punkte des Wachstums der Rove-Republik aufgezeichnet: A constitutional order has three parts: mandate - what the government should do - and meaning - how the public views the role of its duties, rights and options in relationship to the government. These are tied together by mechanism - how the government functions. In American history, and to no small extent world history, the most important mechanism is money. Not in the sense of who gets money - but in the sense of how money works. ... the path to constitutional crisis runs through financial crisis. Before one can have political upheaval, the three pillars of a constitutional order - of a republic - must crumble. As each one weakens, it pushes more of the burden on to the others. As people disagree more and more on the mandate of government, they both fight more and more over the meaning of government - the rhetoric grows harsher and more hostile - and they also attempt to game the monetary system to accomplish by stealth what they could never have gotten agreement to. ... Rove knows that to force the reactionary order, Bush must borrow. He must place a millstone around the necks of the next generation of government, and then make it so that to make those payments, the Republicans must be in charge. If the Democrats take the presidency by accident, the Republican Congress will merely stop doing the behind the scenes financial juggling - of budget borrowing, shuffling of money between accounts, raising the debt ceiling, passing huge unfunded mandates - that keep the economy alive. There will, in such a case, be a massive recession, and the Republicans will take power again. The government will become a massive protection racket, with the public held hostage. ... Think about it, the government is borrowing more than a million dollars a minute - in order to produce hiring growth which is just keeping even with population growth. It's the Red Queen's Race. The Republicans are now building bridges to Europe, because it is Europe that will allow them to keep this up for a little while longer. ... The basis of Rove's Republic will be the massive debt, which can only be financed by back door agreements with Japan, China, Europe and Saudi Arabia. Since the money system won't actually work - merely present the illusion of working, as the real market will be what parts of America's future is being sold off this year in order to keep the money flowing from abroad. ... The crisis isn't in the fall of the dollar, the jobless recovery, the budget deficit, voting irregularities, corruption in the media and congress - or even Iraq and Social Security. It is in how these parts fit together to create one pervasive reactionary order. ... So what is the structure? It involves three parts: Bash, Break, and Borrow. ... It must be made forcefully clear that the debt crisis, the jobless recovery, the war in Iraq, the attack on social security, and the inability to provide medical insurance to all - are part of the same problem. Our money is paper oil - greased with the blood of centuries of conflicts over the middle east and current repression. Until we end this addiction to oil, we will never be free, but live, instead, on a sentence of slavery, which will be redeemed some day, and someday soon. We cannot borrow every cent from the rest of the world to fund an economy that is not growing - where every cent of profit must go into corporate earnings, because that is the only way to keep the borrowed money coming. ... The Democrats must assert that energy is not merely the shackle around the United States, but the root cause of global instability - terrorism, dictatorships in the Middle East, Russia's moves away from Democracy, the instabilities which force China to rigid mercantilism, and which stop the economic growth of our allies in Europe and Japan, while forcing the exploitation of the labor resources of other nations. They must set this as a war between two fundamentally different views of the future, casting aside the last scraps of the old "bipartisan" constitutional order - since the forces that kept that order in place are gone.

Keine leichte Kost zum Schnelllesen und an manchen Punkten sicher nicht ganz ausgereift. "Bashing" als Propagandamittel zur Dämonisierung des politischen Gegners etwa ist keineswegs neu, auch wenn Rove in dieser Kunst sicher ein neuer Meister ist. Und über die wirtschaftliche Aspekte müssen Berufenere urteilen. Aber zumindest ein Zeichen, dass in der Linken in den USA mal wieder nachgedacht und die Lage analysiert wird. Wer noch mehr dazu lesen will: Der lange Blogeintrag beim Agonist beruht auf Hintergründen des Buches The Fourth Republic (1. Kapitel als PDF) von Stirling Newberry.