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It’s a lie when you aggressively extend yourself as an empire and then define your imperial interests as national interests. On the contrary, history’s unbroken evidence record proves that imperialism is harmful to the real interests of the home country, if we consider these to be the health, prosperity, security, and freedom of the people.
Every time the US political classes chatter about, for example, the Middle East, we hear lots about alleged American interests around the globe. Actually, America has no interest in the Middle East, if by “interest” we mean the well-being of the American people. Nor does America have significant interests around the globe. America’s interest, on the contrary, is to roll back the empire and roll back its insane dependency upon globalization.
On the contrary, the original Monroe Doctrine defined the limits, by any rational measure, of American interests. (Of course the Doctrine was imperialistic toward Latin America. This was immoral and by now is rationally obsolete as well. For purposes of this piece we’ll stick with a purely rational, morally dispassionate view of interests.)
Globalization brought benefits only to US corporate and government elites. All it did was maximize the power of the 1%. Therefore globalization has been a great harm to the American interest as defined by the interest of the American people, since the US elites are the worst enemies of the American people.
Stockholm Syndrome sufferers will claim that globalization brought one great benefit to the 99%: It enabled them to buy cheaply a tremendous amount of worthless expensive junk, since this binge could be done on the backs of the global South and by exporting the worst of environmental destruction.
As I said, for this piece we’ll leave aside the morality of living as a leech on the backs of slaves, and we’ll even leave aside what it means to purchase a momentary cheap luxury by destroying your grandchildren’s ecological world, dooming them to cancer and famine.
But was this binge in YOUR interest? Did all this junk make you happy, give you inner peace, cause you to feel more secure financially and physically? If you say Yes, odds are you’re lying. To give the most obvious example, everyone who argues about this, defending the alleged “American way of life”, always is clearly angry, unhappy, most of all very disturbed and scared, in spite of all their material junk. If that weren’t the case, why would they be out there, whether it be in politics or media or just as an internet commenter, expressing such rancor? Why wouldn’t they be off enjoying their utopia, which according to them they have in fact attained? Those who feel safe and at peace don’t go around quarreling.
I say it’s killing your soul. And I say the binge of addiction to worthless expensive junk also was never in the American people’s interest, just as it has never been in the interest of anyone else on Earth to imitate this derangement.
The fact is that the destruction of the American empire, the destruction of globalization, and the restoration of America’s original scope is in the interest of all the peoples of Earth, including the American people. Only a handful of criminal dinosaurs would be harmed. And this too would be greatly in the interest of humanity and the Earth.
Volatility 
As usual, Russ, I agree with what you say. I’d like to offer another view of globalism.
Decades ago there was a man who drove around Seattle with a windmill on his station wagon, handing out fliers promoting World Federalism. He was the first person I heard to suggest we just tear down the Berlin Wall, though he didn’t live to see it fall. He was arrested on both sides of the wall multiple times for publicly defying it in acts of civil disobedience that involved creative uses of a jackhammer, a hot air balloon, and a hammer and chisel.
My point is that there is a valid dream of a democratic global government. Instead of preventing business from globalizing, perhaps we should be pushing to globalize the resistance.
Comment by Vernon Huffman — January 5, 2018 @ 11:43 am
Well, as you know I think centralization and concentration went vastly too far to be anything but destructive of any human purpose and at any rate is physically unsustainable in both energy and ecological terms. So all forms of globalism are both impossible and undesirable going forward.
The utopia of a benign one-world government sounds just like “humanitarian intervention” or “foreign aid”. But I think the historical record proves the one and only good thing the West can do is Get Out.
And given the fact that all national governments and globalization cadres proved to be corrupt at best, and far more often tyrannical, how do you figure tripling down with a “global government” would be anything but the worst tyranny of all? We can be 100% sure it would be the worst tyranny of all, if it could actually enforce control. And if it couldn’t, the world immediately would collapse back to its former state, nation-states at best, more likely Somalias everywhere. Which is already where the existing corporate one-world government is heading.
No, at this site I support every centrifugal force, every break-up, every fragmentation, every secession, and positively, every relocalization, every decentralization, everything which restores systems like food production and distribution to their natural levels and power to as decentralized a form as possible.
Comment by Russ — January 6, 2018 @ 7:38 am
As far as food sovereignty movements and other anti-corporate, anti-globalization, anti-imperialist groups worldwide joining in loose confederations to give one another as much mutual support as possible, I agree on globalizing the resistance.
Comment by Russ — January 6, 2018 @ 7:41 am