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Outline

American freedom: The discourse of the Market by Proxy

Does Free Enterprise produce Democracy?

Historical Assumptions of freedom
A.)The Lineal descent of the concept of freedom in Western Civilization

1.Pierods of economic transformation
a.)Classical, (the Greek inheritance and the myth of the farmer republican Cincinatus)
b.)Medieval (feudal Absolutism)
c.)Mercantile (rise of Lutheran merchant class)
d.)Capitalistic (Industrial Revolution)
e.)Post Industrial Capitalism (Growth of the retail service sector at the expense of manufacturing) - Globalisim

2.The philosophies of progress
a.) Classical (Socrates-Plato-Aristotle (Peloponnesian war)
b.) Aquinas (Usury and material virtue-Source from Weber)
c.) Calvinism ( pre-destined call to capitalism and wealth as virtue)
d.) disposable culture-materialism (multimedia - military industrial complex - American consumerism)

e.)Civil Rights

3.)American Constitutional Philosophy
a.)Locke, Hobbes, Mill, Smith-atomistic competition
b.)private property and Constitutionalism
c.)Westward Expansion (manifest destiny)
d.)Free Markets (invasion of the market model?) trade deficit (oligopoly)
e.)balance between positive and negative liberty (The need to know versus the right to know) wealth power and distribution of access to participatory democracy -the 90% who exist on 10% of the wealth

B.)Collective and Individual freedoms Constructed as Philosophies and legal mores of a modern civilization: America the Superpower
a.)Americanism and Un-Americanism
Naturalization Act, 1790, Alien and Sedition Acts, 1798, Wagner Act, 1935(Unions), - Regulation and deregulation of the economy, modern effects of the latter
b.)Federalism and Anti-Federalism (States Rights-Slavery and private property and the role of Government in dispensing public welfare)
c.)Home Ownership and the American Dream (Industrial Democracy)
d.)The price and the qualifications for freedom (foreign interventions-Cold War and colonialism)
e.)Utilitarianism and the need for Work (Black)
f.)A necessary Evil (Foner on Slavery) legacy of slavery speciousims in modern conservative dialogue (Friedman)

Conclusion: Is globalized free trade a threat to democracy and atomistic capitalism?

American freedom: The discourse of the Market by Proxy

by Tom Wheat

The History of freedom has inherently been constructed by political democracy. Democracy originated in ancient Athenian Greece and despite its uneven system of equalities takes its grace as the lineal descent upon the formations of the corpus loci traditions of modern day liberty institutions, and structures of evolved pluralistic government. So to has the notion of freedom been thought to dually inhabit both the public and private spheres of human interaction in a structured society, i.e., humanity's place in the marketplace as a free actor of cultural and economic exchange of goods and ideas and the sum total of that market interaction producing a synergistic free flow of capital that propelled Western Civilization to the status that enjoys today --one of core political social and economic hegemon.

The archetypes of democratic Western Civilization, Solon and Kliesthenese, officiated a slave supported Democracy, and justice dispensed by archons and oligarchy. The extent of freedom was regimented through a five tiered class system, with the bottom being that of a slave, followed by a Thete, (laborer) then zegutai (artisan), Hippeas, (calvary), and Pentakostamedemnoi (the aristocracy - supported archonship). The system of government and the vote in the common assembly was open only to the first three classes on the basis of their qualified ability for property ownership. Participation in the polis formed the corpus of everyday life for those qualified for citizenship. Political Assemblies were often held in conjunction with Street markets and so the ideological myth of majority free labor, and citizen participation in democratic government came to be sustained and predicated on the notion of the market as the authenticator and beneficiary of governance. The tradition of Roman codified law articulated a common republican root to the genius of emperor, sustaining the drive towards the west's first experience with continental empire. The Roman republican ideal of Cinncinatus the farmer, who serves in the legions of Rome and then returns to his field, marked the notion of roman citizenship as requiring independent free farmers to sustain the demands of that early colonial empire. This metaphor would later be invoked after the American Revolution in describing George Washington’s decision to forego a third term and not to be elected as Generalissimo Dictator for life in the new American republic.  The first 1500 years of Western Colonization marked the evolution of western trade and philosophy the latter of which supported the ideological drive towards modern progress. First was the notion of uniform law to regulate the flow of commerce and second was one of which important decrees were granted that sustained the innate notion of majority liberty against arbitrary authority, i.e., the imposition of the Magna Carta on King John by his nobles in 1215, C.E. The sovereign feudal lord of the Middle ages relied on the Crusades to expand the frontiers of Western trade into the middle east, and to garner a market share in the silk road caravans of the Asian Market. Increased Western trade consolidation inevitably brought the interchange of eastern and western ideas, i.e., the re-discovery of Aristotle and Algebra but gradually these Arab variants introduced to Western Civilization were gradually subsumed by western theories of material evolutionary dominance.

Athenian Democracy fell first to oligarchy then Spartan and later Macedonian Absolutism. The Roman Empire fell due to the Huns of Central Asia who forced migrations of the barbarian Visigoths into the Roman colonies. The ensuing Dark ages resulted in a loss of centralized political authority and the rise of feudal manorialisim. The two entitles sustained were the Christian Church and members of the Roman and now anglicized feudal aristocracy. Most of the classical philosophies of the Greeks were lost, and international trade was replaced by agrarian land tenancy. The loss of the term citizen in the political lexicon was replaced by decentralized feudal nobles forming an elite class of knights and scribes that represented the formalized assets to political authority, and service to the king as a condition of land ownership invested by royal decree, and serfs who worked the manor. Common freedom in the feudal age was essentially protection from nature and barbarians, and so government of this time was more subsumed to the notion of private consolidation of land as a defensive bulwark from barbarians and competing feudal factions. The law of the manor was almost absolute for the ordinary serf, and he suffered little chance for redress before a king.

With the rise of centralized political authority and Mercantilism, monarchy and capital reached a synergistic accord, beginning with the Spanish inquisition, the apocrypha of ordered harmony replaced freedom, culminating in the colonization of a hitherto undiscovered continent, America. The Mercantile Economy had centralized the governments of Europe and had also created an economic autonomy for the merchant classes, some of whom in the case of the Republic of Venice became wealthy and as powerful as kings. These merchant republics in Italy precipitated the rise of mercantile capitalism throughout Western Europe.

The Zeitgeist of capitalism was conceived as having been spurned on by the Renaissance trade alliance balance of power between the middleman Turks and Western European merchant traders. Russian Tsar Peter the Great opened formally closed Mongolian trade routes to Asia by office of vicar and the wealth of Asia flowed into the German-Templar Hanseatic league. These Merchants formed an ethos to success, that later were to form the institutional foundations for Calvinism and its worldview toward progress, virtue and modernity. The liberty to coin fellowship to none under the infallibility of a church ruler i.e., the pope, secularized Germany and England from the influence of the Vatican Church bureaucracy. The Beheading of Thomas More ended the debate between church authority and secular Anglican authority in England. [1] Secularization of authority was heralded as a great grant of liberty to freedom. This new period received what was the qualification for an increase in rational liberty as Hobbes conceived of it --the commonwealth law of kings to rule by class councilor decree, and rule by council of the elite-common elect without a divine mandate as the sole authoritarian crux of temporal authority. As the western European Nations geared inexorably towards centralization, rulers and parliaments also implemented economic planning models of monetised commodity exchange and export driven domestic economies as a form of state to state raw material price warfare to substantiate the pause between consolidation of raw material assets, i.e., printing and gunpowder would have in shaping the long-term inheritance of risen European colonialism upon the world stage discourse of freedom as apothecaries' measure.

The causal circumstances for Europe's centralization resulted from the surplus acquisition of raw material wealth which led to the specialization of all material and labor capital, under a specific public or private designation or delineation of authority under a system of uniform property laws that formalized the code of class and economic market relations to the relationship of authority of the state and the market as the ultimate end of the scale of the surplus accumulation spectrum production of virtue. Hence modernization was first conceived as the consolidation of all capital under a physical, public and private bureaucracy.

Max Weber "the Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," (online)

According to Max Weber the revolution of double entry accounting provided the rational technological apparatus for the rise of Capitalism in Europe. Kings decreased the amount of provincial duties excised on the flow of merchant capital. The end result was the beginning of the consolidation for the means of technological innovation and production to be placed under the control of private enterprise. This gave rise to a new powerful class of merchants and burgeoning entrepreneurs that competed with the traditional royal public sphere of core hegemonic authority.

“The most general pre-supposition for the existence of this capitalism is that of rational capital accounting. Such Accounting involves first the appropriation of all physical means of production – land, raw materials, machinery tools,..as disposable property of autonomous private industrial enterprise. This is a phenomenon known only in our time, when the army alone forms a universal exception to it. In the second place, it involves the freedom of the market, that is the absence of irrational limitations on trading.”(Weber[2] , On Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion, 109)

The rise of merchant secular authority also contributed to the gradual monetization and commercialization of public life, work and limited ownership of land paralleled the rise of market towns centered on agricultural and proto-industrial manufacturing, with surplus capital sustained and invested upon usury. Land displacement of the commoner brought on by the emergence of the new capitalist order precipitated the need for work and so capitalism substituted dependant wage labor in place of the independent subsistence farmer. According to Weber that Capitalism has evolved into a chaotic quandary of rational deterministic fateful coercion and separation of the worker from the means to procure and manufacture capital. Hence the peasant was transformed into a laborer.

“The Capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the Individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relations, to conform to the capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms will be eliminated from the economic scene just as inevitably as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the street without a job.”(Weber, 115)

Accordingly Weber identifies that Capitalism as an institution of knowledge indoctrination gradually came to outpace both the governments of state and the bureaucracies of religion.

“At present under our individualistic political, legal and economic institutions, with the forms of organization and general structure which are peculiar to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, as has been said, purely as a result of adaptation. …In such circumstances men’s commercial and social interests tend to determine their opinions and attitudes…Modern capitalism has become dominant and has become emancipated from its old supports. At one time it was able to destroy the old forms of medieval regulation of economic life only in alliance with the growing power of modern state and the same thing can be said about its relations with religious forces.”(123-24)

Foner Adam Smith, Locke, Black

According to the Historian William Foner, the American development of political freedom embodied a complex of moral ideas. Thus, The universalities of our culture have innately been constructed on the basis of difference and exclusion. Freedom is a set of practical rights and entitlements that comes with citizenship. The struggle to define freedom in America centered on the notion of whether equality was the antithesis to freedom.  Freedom’s evolution into liberty after the American revolution witnessed the arrival of state’s rights doctrines and morally legislated slave doctrines that justified the enslavement of African Americans under the Eurocentric subjective notion of liberty’s primacy to culture.  The outcome of the American Civil War settled the debate on the moral economics of slavery, but not the debate concerning government’s role as the dispenser of suffrage, rather liberty sufficed as a rational allotment of universal variances and access to suffrage constrained by the color line of race. States had eliminated all property qualifications from voting rights for all white Americans by 1840. However, according to Foner, the theme of freedom in America was one in which a nation had to rationally reconcile the conflicting periods of its past expressions of freedom, to invoke a larger presently sustained view of American freedom as it exists in the lives of ordinary Americans as freedom justly earned, equal participation of citizenship – E pluribus Unum.

Foner argues that the language of freedom if we are to ascribe that such a condition exists, tends to be historically contrived as opposed to theoretically subsumed in the popular imagination. The two most historically common themes to freedom in America were political and economic freedom as certain individuals vested in free choice. Political freedom carried early significance from the original colonial state burgesses to the establishment of the colonists calls to self determination in establishing their inalienable right to revolt against a system of taxes and laws that did not carry equal weight in political representation. The earliest historical notion of American Economic freedom fundamentally involved the economic autonomy of the farmer being vested with the means of owning private property and the right to furnish the means of his own free labor as a measure of independent agricultural subsistence, to outright defense of agrarian fundamentalisms as being the ultimate core being of the American pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, American freedom is defined by the Bill of Rights.

The philosophical traditions of American freedom initially carried religious sanctification of the pre destined call to enrich the social order. Liberty however, in common exercise is thought to have originated from John Locke. It was Locke who first advocated that freedom was a universal standard enjoyed naturally by all. That such a freedom in order to create enlightened rational governance had to be adopted, codified and dispensed by a common law elect, owing title to private property. During the 17^th and 18^th century, wage labor was conceived at this time as a form of economic servility. Only indentured servants and occasionally slaves worked for wages in the new republic.

Freedom and slavery comprise the two extremes of happiness and misery in a society. American Freedom has required that liberty separate from the majority, the common interests of abiding moral rational principle, the principle of necessary exclusion, ‘other persons’ deemed necessary to support the system of liberty as the instrument of class will. The Framers of the Constitution defined appropriate political freedom as requiring a balance of uniform class and cultural intent predicated between positive and negative virtues of liberty suspended upon the notion that freedom of the many is choice for the few. Liberty innately required the enslavement of others to sustain its common held experience that it is better to not question the dichotomy of master and slave more so then for the multitudes of progress to enjoy liberty’s fruits since they alone acquiesce to know liberty’s true virtue. Adam Smith the abolitionist and unknowing father of American Capitalism reflected that in a republic it would be impossible to overthrow slavery since the lawmakers themselves were slaveholders. According to Smith ownership of property was the ultimate exercise of individual freedom.  For the Southern Aristocracy, the thought of the imposition of universal racial suffrage was inconceivable in a moral or rational sense, because freedom qualified them the privilege of having liberty, and to emancipate a slave would constitute a negative liberty that would impinge on the inalienable right of property ownership and constitute a form of enslavement and assault upon the Americanized ideal the free independent Farmer.

After the American Revolution the government instituted the Naturalization Act of 1790. This act defined who was entitled to property, i.e., free white people.  Strangely, those excluded were European aristocrats along with non-white persons. Both were viewed under the prism of natural incapacity, as being deficient in the moral qualities that made freedom possible. Liberty for a citizen required the capacity for reason, though it was subsumed to exist naturally in Anglo Saxony. However, not all whites were free in that women were viewed to be irrational, passionate, and to overtly dependent upon Patriarchal authority for survival. Furthermore, The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 effectively defined the limits of freedom in the antebellum south despite its  formal legal repudiation in 1801. The Act passed as a result of the XYZ affair [3] forbade media criticism and justified media censorship of government  on the grounds of harmonious accordance to the popular political view.

The experience of slavery was heralded with much more fervor in the south than did it fully take institutional hold on the North rather the North was credited with inventing the euphemistically free wage labor factory system.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed the Southern aristocracy to count their slaves as part of the overall population in determining congressional seats. This method of counting involved a 3/5ths ratio affixed to each slave that was to be counted as the proportional total allotment of seats in the House of Representatives. The end result of the Missouri Compromise resulted in the geographical distinction between slave states and free states. Freedom was defined as both political freedom and political emancipation.

The Constitutional definitions for free and un-free persons reflected the document’s vague reference to ‘other persons,’ those outside of the rational order of civilization.  Those persons willfully excluded were Native Americans, and slaves. The rationale behind Native American exclusion stemmed from tribes owing their natural allegiance to their own tribal sovereignties, and hence was deemed not part of the body politic. The other distinction of exclusion was applied to Slaves.  Slaves were deemed to be irrational beasts under the custodial of benevolent paternalist slaveocracy. Foner argues that the contribution of ascribed universal liberty and economic self-interest and the imposition of class and racial stigma upon a specific ethnicity was the ultimate contribution of the West to the world as its enduring legate to progress. (Foner, 38).

According to Thomas Jefferson the greatest threat to American freedom lay in large government and the emerging capitalist economy tied to English capitalism. Jefferson opposed the creation of a central banking institution and found such an institution to be thoroughly undemocratic. Source: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/BofUS-H&J.htm

During this time American civic life was conceived of being comprised of a public sphere independent of government and lateral in influence.

The ideal of the male sole proprietor, entrepreneur marked the philosophical legacy of Franklin’s Protestant ethos to success, however as the system of Protestant Capitalism came to vigorously take hold on the public and private consolidation of land, populations and social and political institutions, that ideal changed into the iconographic image of the American free man as the industrious, thrifty worker in a burgeoning industrial steel factory. The growth of the Urban sector dramatically redefined the notion of America’s eternal need for open spaces to colonize. With the rise of corporations, liberty came to be redefined as “liberty of contract.” Corporate Power came to be defined as industrial freedom, involving the sum total of American moral and physical ingenuity.

After the American revolution the symbol for liberty, was represented by  Ceres, the Roman Goddess of Agriculture, whose image was politically  anthropomorphized into the image of the American goddess of liberty. America perceived itself as undertaking the first free experiment in self-governance in history. As such  the ideological view that America had a political proselytizing message specified the ideological tenants of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. During this time three factors would effect American conceptions of freedom. 1.) territorial expansion, 2.)political democratization, and 3.) the rapid rise and increase of market relations. Inherent to American economic success was the belief and economic need for westward expansion, the need to continuously colonize to sustain unlimited growth. The ideological view of  Manifest Destiny advanced the notion that America had a divinely appointed mission to expand all throughout North America. The idealism lay in the notion that America’s federal structure had a separation of powers and a democratic system, and equalization of power relationships between states hence freedom was subsumed to embody an empire of believers.(Foner, 50)  By 1860 all states had eliminated property requirements for voting.  Between this time voter participation was around roughly 80% of the white voting male populace.

According to Foner this was the beginning of pluralism, the political diffusion of power underlining the ideal of the self-governing local community. In this sense suffrage was a privilege and not a right.  According to Adams, “Individual freedom was individual power.” Government could balance this potential force by regulating the marketplace. Like most Whigs, Adams favored compulsory public education. For other established icons of American freedom such as Emerson, would comment upon, as one of which Americans, were, ‘freedom fanatics.’ Marbury vs. Madison necessitated Class Freedom was dependant upon the ordered balance of state and federal rights. In that Decision the US Supreme Court defined that no state law could conflict with the constitution. In reality then under the discursive terminology of ‘other person,’ the US passed the libertine test for rationality when the South invoked states rights to justify slavery in the south as a ‘free’ form of economic enterprise.

During the American antebellum period laissev faire economics came to be touted as the ultimate expression of rational freedom. This belief was sustained by the market industrial revolution of the 1820’s and 1830’s. During this time steam power and canals facilitated the rise of rapid mass commercial transport throughout the former colonies. The increasing economic surplus facilitated the consolidation of merchant capital into factory capital and marked the rise of the modern corporation. During this period the individual household gradually receded from its role as the center of independent economic production.  Freedom was defined as the ability to compete in the market place.

The moral manifest destiny of the age carried the crux of Protestant religion to proselytize the subsumed glorious progress of the age culminating in the tent revivalist meetings of the second “great awakening.”  The congregations of the masses who participated in the ‘Great Awakening’ believed that religion, self-improvement and self-determination were the highest ideals of freedom. For these idealists, Yahweh was a benevolent god and not a vengeful god who disdained men for all eternity due to original sin; rather the development of a closer relationship to the moral and natural spirit of God resulted in freedom of the individual conscience. This was considered the highest form of spiritual freedom. Yet the ideal of Christian freedom carried the duality of secular and religious form. One the one hand individualism practically defined its ode to success as involving a material profit base to virtue as well as affirmation of divinity’s conscience within oneself.  The..“Market revolution had a contradictory impact on the inherited definition of economic autonomy as a condition of freedom.”(Foner, 57) On the other hand the real and practical symptom as to the measure and degree of freedom in the new capitalist market economy, saw individual farmers become more enmeshed in market relations and consequently many lost their independent autonomy to the dictates of the market and the self interest of the emerging tycoons of business as the rationale of capitalism had organized the American Entrepreneurial consolidation of talent. Capitalism’s further development in the Cities made them the centers of commercial exchange and manufacturing production. Subsistence to the land was replaced by the freedom to have a job and earn a wage, a revolution of circumstance often disdained by muse of antiquity. Cicero the Roman logician believed that only slaves and non-free persons worked for wages. Mass consumption of Capitalism was touted as evolved economic freedom in that it stipulated that the source of wealth was now to be vested in labor capital as opposed to traditional ownership and independent means of production. The growing interdependent structures of the marketplace gradually redefined freedom from the constitutionally ideal sense and subsumed a real materialist rational edification as progress requiring the specialization and organization of talent under an authoritarian capitalist market structure. To the extent of its history, capitalism, and Americanism have never been able to fully reconcile the loss of property ownership with the substitution of wage benefit as being equal players in the atomistic ideals of Capitalism’s creation.

“Invigorated by the popular conviction which dated back at least as far back as John Locke, that labor was the source of all wealth and the worker entitled to the fruits of his labor, the ideal of the autonomous small producer reemerged in Jacksonian America as a full fledged critique of early capitalism and its transformation of free labor into a commodity.”(Foner, 59)

Later periods of American history would pick up after the excesses of the “Gilded and progressive ages.” The age of the New Deal, sought to address the nature and the right of Americans to have economic security in a market far more volatile to individual investors than to owners of large corporations.  With the triumph of American capitalism over the Nazi’s American economic freedom heralded the new found freedom for its citizens to partake in a ale-carte mass consumption of liberties in all forms of market-media expression of the human commercialized psyche.

The 19^th century experience with Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and Progressivism represented a period when American’s held high regard for civic affairs-though those affairs were seldom ennobled after initial intention.

20^th century America:

Chomsky 911

Corporate media & threat to Democracy

The arrival of political freedom in the modern 21^st century carries the legacy of 20^th century modernism. This modernism was sustained on the belief of democracy and free enterprise as eternal progress and that destiny as the White man’s progress and the right of qualified access. Those Moral and ethical traditions never matched fully with the prima facie application of legislated freedom as a tradition of the modern American Civil Society.  Some would argue that under the commercial sphere of relations we as a society do not exist as free independent actors.

The belief in America and what Americans believe in, -- is our free democratic tradition. However, as America has expanded in Cultural and economic influence it has also had to rely on its conventional military, including traditional allies, and allies of necessity. This line has begun to blur as well. The last time the military was part of a social movement was in WWII when we were battling the Nazi's and Fascist absolutism. America became the world leader due to its ability to mass-produce and through victory by being the dominant player received the torch of empire from English colonialism. Participatory Democracy was viewed as having triumphed over autarky. American ideals were thought to be universal.

During America’s entrance into the 20^th century witnessed a series of world wars and conflicts waged over scarce resources. America became known as the free world and the defender of the free world. America defeated the NAZIS as a system of government but not as an enterprise. Some of Hitler’s most endowed financial supporters were US companies, Ford, General Motors, Dupont, and J P Morgan. (Source: http://www.sumeria.net/politics/shadv3.html)

 During the Cold War America’s newly created military industrial complex became ideologically identified as the weapon of liberty against the coercive Soviet Marxist inspired Third World. Consequently, at the end of WWII we inherited the mantle of European colonialism. The country was transformed from a relatively free democratic republic into a country that came to field an agenda of liberal economic expansion at the expense of actual freedom and democracy in the countries so affected by our imperialist expansion. Now as a world super power we had to create a national security state and a central intelligence agency to reinforce our dominance in world affairs. This forced us to compromise many of our innate republican ideals of freedom.  We then proceeded to support any fascist regime ready to be economic suzerain so long as it wasn't socialist.

  As World War II ended along with traditional European colonialism there was a genuine belief among these countries that self-determination and sovereignty would be restored, and that key social reform would be implemented. Many Asian intellectual elites looked to American models while the warlords of Asia, the wealthy autocratic elite admired American weapons to contain their populace and enact power plays against their rivals.

At the height of our expansion after WWII we entered an era of unparalleled economic prosperity. However, the democracy that created the power of unlimited mass production became the military industrial complex that guided US foreign policy after the war.

Democracy in practice has only existed briefly before it was undone by oligarchy just ask the ancient Athenians. During the Cold War The US committed itself to supporting autocratic regimes based on vague geopolitical principals, of collective security that often reflected the economic self-interest of individual politicians more so than ideal collective national security aims. In reality the Cold War was a means in which the military industrial complex created during WWII sought to maintain its function as a supplier of military hardware. Only by perpetually existing in a state of emergency could we continue to justify increased defense spending, while in the process we were making more enemies in the third world with our reactionary philosophy of propping up the dictator to safeguard democracy. In this process we came to train assassins and later would be terrorists, such as Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, among countless others. Cold War military interventions were often based more on ideology and trade expansion than out of real military necessity. With the Cold War, Interventions in Korea and Vietnam were based on the Domino theory, an ideology that there was a real threat to democracy and capitalism posed by the emergence of soviet client states in Asia.  In this process the US military supported regimes that did not adhere to true notions of either capitalism or democracy.

For example, the early pro US regimes of S. Korea and especially Vietnam The Tandem of presidents' Rhee, Diem, and Nguyen illustrated how corruption could not only undermine a military campaign (through government bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption) but also the value of supporting a regime that ran anathema to every American's ideal hurt citizen and troop morale and also mobilized the majority of the local population into total opposition towards what they perceived as an occupying alien imperial force.

Many individual US soldiers on the other hand truly believed that intervention in these Asian countries was justified, politically and ideologically. Most GI's truly felt that their presence and the war that they were fighting would eventually bring peace and freedom to a country under the threat of the soviet expansionary menace. That with victory the American way of life would come to the third world. The benefits of capitalism at home would come to the peoples of the third world.

The war on the other hand had an economic incentive to be fought. South East Asia had originally been part of Imperial Japan's, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A trade bloc whereby the Japanese would dominate East Asia as its dominate sphere of influence and like the European colonial's Japan wanted to establish client states with advantageous trade terms facilitating the flow of tin and rubber along with other cash commodities.

We lost the Vietnam War because we lost the collective will of our people and of the host country we were supposedly defending against the alleged evil of communism. So while our government preached the ideology of the Soviet evil empire the reality was that US mid-western grain farmers engaged in active trade with Russia. This is only just one illustration of the economic power plays that have lead men into the battlefield. War is good business for some people.

According to George Kennan, the architect of American Foreign policy, the Cold War could be described as being based on a bipolar system of mutual antagonism. With the rise of the Cold war it became necessary to maintain massive defense spending for the ideology of freedom, of which the direct application came to be support for fascist regimes counter to the ideals of freedom. In the 1960's we were still masters of the universe. However, we attempted to fight three wars at a time when we had only the economic power to wage two wars. The wars fought were the Cold War, Vietnam War, and the War on Poverty. The end result of that was by 1968 we had managed to acquire a huge deficit and European currency traders made a run on the American dollar. The Nixon response was to de-link the dollar from gold and float the currency. At this point Americans began to lose their economic freedom. Soon we would have stagflation, inflation, oil embargos and a host of maladies that would become a burden to the American empire and also would lead to the erosion of American freedom.  After the 60's hangover subsided, American awareness for politics also began to drift into the abyss of corporate relativism. The Burden of empire was exacting its toll like Rome we also began to intellectually wither.

America’s recent stake and commitment to political and military interventions in the Middle East crisis is a situation borne of political and economic adversarial antagonisms. On the one hand US economic security is dependant upon Arab oil and on the other hand our own military industrial complex is wedded to Israel both ideologically and in terms of collective political and economic security. On the one hand we supply Israel with Arms and ask that they be our regional peacemakers and the fjord in the path of Pan Arabism. In the course Israel has become dependant entirely on the US for its own survival. While Israel is an effective short-term wall that divides the Arab world from total military consolidation its own institutional structure also profits from threats to its own security.  It is a paradox of reason that nonetheless still exists when a third of the Israeli economy is geared directly towards military defense.  Since heavily militarized economies by nature are inflationary our foreign aid package to Israel guarantees that that country will not have to bear the burden of that inflation. Every year we supply Israel with a 5 billion dollar foreign aid/DOD funding package. The reason for this adversarial relationship is the fact that we use Israel as a regional power to leverage the Arabs to supply oil at a rate consistent with our economic expansion.

Secondly our demand for oil forces us into economic stagnancy whereby we will go to any lengths to sacrifice technological innovation for trade practices that will guarantee that oil will be the sole form of fuel through every cycle of boom and bust in the economy until the economy collapses when the supply of oil runs out. So goes the wealth of nations.

 The Palestinian -Israeli situation could be summed up as an ageless blood honor clan feud locked into a system of global transnational political and economic policies surrounding arms sales and oil production. There are those in the Israeli and Arab camps that clearly profit from the violence in the Middle East. Every true attempt at peace has either been derailed by assassination (Rabin) or empty assurances of further extensions of autonomy (Oslo accords) to the Palestinians. Before and during British occupation the majority of the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel were Palestinian. To some degree they had their country taken from them in 1948 before they ever saw independence.

The mercantilist practices of OPEC also insure that the vast economic bounty of vibrant trade with the West goes solely into the hands of sheiks and little left is doled out to the populace, the masses of whom exist in utter poverty. It is in a state of poverty that the Arab youth of the Middle East turn towards the solace of politicized religion, an ephemeral god that can imbue their own hopeless economic plight with a profound sense of purpose and destiny. So as they are starving it is better for them blow themselves up for the reward of heaven then to face a dismal existence of poverty and despotism on earth. Countries where the prevailing system of rule is Autocracy can only breed poverty, in the countries where such policies constitute the philosophy of the regime. This policy of rule by a few elites predicated on strategic necessity, and collective arms pacts is in anachronism that leads to terrorism. To some extent this Oil-Arms containment policy system is a holdover from the Cold War when we waged an economic battle with the Soviet Union in regards to which hegemon would control the Middle East and how Arab oil producing client states could be established. However, the binomial of supply and maintenance the demand for arms to safeguard that supply forces us to contend with autocracy in the place of freedom.  It is unfortunate that the Palestinians are caught up in the geopolitics of oil and the arms trade. A situation we largely help to manufacture due to our dependence on Arab oil and Israel's overwhelming dependence on a militarized economy for both economic and political survival.

Arab countries find it convenient to politically manipulate the Palestinian plight to further their own aims in regards to their own desire to leverage the US since their economies are solely geared towards oil exportation. Seldom have they held to the Palestinian cause for long when it became evident that we would give into their demands to buy more oil.

So long as our economy is dependant on oil and arms to safeguard that oil we will have Middle Eastern terrorism to contend with both at home and abroad.

The state of Israel once an image of redemptive Zion reborn was transformed into a nuclear power. Under the American system of distributive justice The Saudis were allowed to continue their medieval dictatorship despite being number one supporters of terrorism all because they have the world's largest oil reserves. The Israeli's became our regional means of leverage against the Arabs. The Arabs supply us with oil which makes a few Sheiks rich enough to leverage American Israeli leverage through arms sales and support to terrorist organizations. The Israelis respond with demands for more foreign and military aid.  The end result is that more military hardware is either supplied directly or indirectly all throughout the Middle East by the United States. Such a system demands that you add fuel to the fire and yet bemoan the blaze when the intention was to put out the fire.

Israel's politicians have used the instability and violence in the Middle East to work out advantageous military contracts with our own military industrial complex. Further escalation of the conflict means that the 30% of the Israeli economy that is tied directly to the military budget can receive military hardware from the US at bargain basement prices in the name of collective security. Since most militarized economies suffer from inflation, Israel has an advantageous arrangement with the US whereby our military foreign aid package offsets that inflation. So it is not surprising that a good portion of the ruling class in the Middle East sleeps in the same bed as the US oil lobby. The military industrial complex also profits from the mid east malaise.  Continuous conflict insures that US can continually justify an annual 5 billion dollar military aid package to Israel.

Source: http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/USIsrael/U.S._Assistance_to_Israel1.html  Furthermore, 30% of the Israeli economy is directly tied toward national defense. Israel has access to the latest weapons systems from the US. They also have nuclear weapons. Dependence on Arab oil forces us to support undemocratic regimes in the farcical name of democracy and free trade. Arab leaders see our dependence on oil as leverage by means to expand their own regional economic autonomy visa via the threat of embargo.  The system of fair trade has been reduced to the power politics of majority oligopolies and minority cartels.

All the political rhetoric about democracy and human rights is only used as justification for military intervention in countries not in the US economic sphere of friends. For those inside the circle the rules need not apply. Hence, The principle became propaganda used to increase foreign aid budgets on capital hill. In fact the practice constitutes outright hypocrisy. For example, we supported Saddam Hussein in the 80's in his war with Iran despite the fact that he used chemical weapons against Iran and also against his Kurdish minority. Through the vehicle of free trade American Chemical chemicals were the first to develop his chemical weapons arsenal. Iraq's neighbor, Turkey is our ally, and yet it has used poison gas against the same Kurdish minority in its own borders. Nothing is said about Turkey only about Iraq. Yet it is these same Kurds we laud as heroes for opposing Saddam's brutal regime.   The concept of Human rights then became only an ideological discourse applied only to those countries that were not in the US political economic orbit as a psychological justification for military intervention. If you are in the circle then the moral standards need not apply. In truth US Democracy and capitalism became dependant upon autocratic despots to safeguard its geopolitical ambitions. The price for empire was the sacrifice of our democratic principals.

After Vietnam we had the despot Shah of Iran to prop up. Also when we were beginning to decry the autocrat Kadafi, US oil interests with some US government support had long been pursuing economic ties to Libya despite Libya being named as a state sponsor of terrorism. With the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah, US policymakers saw it necessary to arm Saddam.  In a classic divide and conquer strategy, it was hoped that the split of the former Persian state would yield a malleable set of regional interests politically weakened by tribal and religious conflict, and eventually have the region transformed into an oil producing client state for America. Thus, the unintended consequence of this was that in 1981 we set out to supply Saddam with arms poison gas, for use against Kurds and the Iranians, courtesy of American Chemical companies.  That war went on until 1988. In 1989 the soviet Afghan war began, and so we began to supply afghan tribal factions along with Osama Bin Laden's own faction of mujahadin. Victorious indeed we were against the soviets, except that old allies became new enemies and new enemies fast became old friends.

The rhetoric of American foreign policy today touts the expansion of democratic principles and yet its practice of doling out foreign aid is based more on the horizontal integration of the world's economic wealth into the hands of the power elite classes as opposed to actual infra-structural investment in a third world country. Third World countries are designed more on the lines of a mercantile system in which all domestic production in those countries is geared for export.  The poverty of these nations fans the flames of nationalism and since dissent is not tolerated in these countries it will always be the US who is viewed as the sole aggressor and infidel. The more we retaliate and continue to prop up despotic regimes just for the sake of extracting oil out of a country without real regard as to the genuine welfare of the people whose natural resources we exploit, the more we insure that the cycle of autocracy, poverty and terrorism will come to be increasingly more visible in our own country.

Historically, one can look to past empires for evidence of the same trends we are witnessing today. The rise of imperial Rome saw to the dissolution of the roman republic and the expansion of empire. The second Punic wars transformed a relatively prosperous society into a society of slaves and aristocrats. In the last 100 years prior to the reign of Augustus, Rome was at civil war and by the election of Augustus the roman senate the last bastion of republicanism was divested of its power and existed in name only. Rome continued to expand yet the price for that expansion was freedom and imperialism was what ultimately did in the empire. The same could be said about the fate of British Victorian colonialism. Can America sustain its empire of freedom at the expense of its manufacturing base?