Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 14, July 5, 2003
The current crisis is the crisis of the rich, and it is being paid by the poor, by the poor people and the poor countries.
The economic “locomotives” have stopped. The war on Iraq has not given rise to the expected economic upturn for the US economy as many people were expecting. The president of the oil and weapon barons has a new plan: Tax cuts for the rich. This will get the “most important locomotive” of world economy back on the track again. The minor German locomotive is on the sidetrack, in recession. Germany’s BNP will be negative this year, going down by 0.1 percent. Panic is spreading to the rest of the EU with fear of deflation and falling prices. The Asian super locomotive, Japan, has been rolling backwards for the last ten years and is in deep recession.
The claqueurs of capitalism have not so much to write home about: The world economic crisis again shows that this historically outdated system cannot overcome the ruinous recessions of the crises, not to mention ensure prosperity and progress for the world’s citizens, the poor. Furthermore, the world crisis is being accompanied by war, a whole series of US-launched wars, which the war criminal general Franks calls “World War IV” (the Americans consider “the Cold War” as World War III).
The US has just announced that it will stop its military aid to 50 countries which support the International Criminal Court and will not sign bilateral agreements on excepting US war criminals from proceedings and punishment. A number of NATO member countries and especially important allies are excepted from the sanctions.
When the US is moving so brutally against these countries, the major part of them being pro-US regimes, it can be connected with the fact that the superpower does not consider them as necessary as before; the US is developing a new generation of weapons controlled by the US itself and based in space, weapons, which will be able to hit any target on the earth with destructive force.
The US world hegemony rests on two pillars:
Firstly, it rests on the overwhelming military supremacy of the US over all its rivals. The US military expenses are three times bigger than the military budgets of the EU countries all together. They are bigger than the military expenses of the next 15 countries combined. No country or group of countries is just close to the US. Nobody is trying to challenge the US military power seriously.
Secondly, the US hegemony is based on the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Until the euro appeared in 1999, there was no competitor to the US dollar in world trade. The dominance of the US dollar in world economy is just as important to US interests as the global military dominance of the US. This has meant a decisive source for permanent exploitation of the rest of the world since the end of World War II.
But the inflated US dollar is also the weak point of the US. Until 1989, the US was a creditor country in the global economy. Not at least the incredible military expenses have changed the US to a debtor country. In the end of this year, it is expected that the US foreign debt will reach the astronomical amount of 3.7 trillion dollars. The yearly US trade deficit is around 500 billion dollars.
And the threat from the euro against the US dollar is real. The value of the euro was falling until 2002, but when the Internet bubble collapsed, the Enron scandals were revealed, and the US economy went into a recession, the investments in dollars began to decline. When the war on Iraq was launched, the US dollar was in free fall. A serious challenge to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a huge advantage to the US, would mean a so destroying crisis that “The Great Depression” fades in comparison.
This is an important part of the background of the unprecedented aggressiveness of the US superpower against friends as well as enemies, the latter being in immediate danger of becoming war booty, and the strategic struggle between the US and the EU forms the leitmotif of it all. This is also the background of the US rhetoric about the “old” and “new” Europe.
In other words, the US is trying not so much to conquer world hegemony as to maintain the present system which it is controlling by weapons and dollars. Therefore, the wars are coming. But at the same time, the fragile and unstable foundation on which the whole “New World Order”, the whole capitalist system as a global system rests, is being revealed. The crisis is the crisis of the rich.
July 1, 2003