In My View

For a fistful of rice

Such are the signs of the times. The US president, George W Bush blames China and India for rice rationing in US stores. He claims that rising demand for food in newly prosperous China and India is cutting down the supplies to the developed world. If one thought, this was one of his famous gaffes, read what his staunch ally, European Union was saying. The European Union’s commissioner for agriculture and rural development echoed the same sentiments only a few days after Bush said his piece.

Those statements can be viewed in more ways than one. One such view would be to see it as a grudging acceptance of the changing global reality. The current issue of the venerable Foreign Affairs journal carries an apologia on the US, shoring up its waning power. Fareed Zakaria argues in that piece that while during Queen Victoria’s times, the Sun did not set on British Empire, it did set within a century. But he argues, the Sun might not set on the US Empire for a few reasons.

Zakaria, like all first generation immigrant converts, has an abiding faith in the USA’s continuing economic supremacy. He also believes that the country’s ever expanding GDP would be able to sustain the nation’s key leverage, the ever expanding military adventures, thus upholding its political suzerainty on much of the globe.He also believes that the USA’s ability to attract immigrants gives it an edge over, say, Europe. He feels that though manufacturing has left American shores, the country’s competitiveness would be continued on the back of research, innovation and design. Zakaria says that the US’s lead in quality higher education would give it an edge over countries like China and India. Ironically, he sees the US’s bane in its politics being captured by “special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups.”

Each of these points are belied by a separate set of facts. A recent survey by the US’s Northwest Area Foundation says that one in two Americans say that there are a “lot” of people in their immediate communities who are struggling to make ends meet. Four in ten Americans say there are a lot of people working full-time jobs, yet still struggling economically.

Half of the American public says that they personally know someone who works two jobs, but still is struggling. But the study argues that poverty and a lack of development in the USA is a “local issue.” And there lies the rub.

For, the crisis of the USA today is systemic. It is an accumulation of sins committed by successive governments riding on the back of an extreme rightward shift of a dominant section of the population – the chauvinistic white working class of the American South. Robert Brenner writes in New Left Review that the US’s Republican Party under the likes of George W Bush’s chief henchman, Karl Rove, made political inroads in this traditional Democratic Party vote bank by pandering to racism and patriarchy. He writes, “Southern workers were politically atomized, individualized in the extreme, and therefore unusually open - not to say historically prepared - to embrace non-class forms of solidarity: race, the patriarchal family, nationalism-cum-militarism, and Protestant fundamentalism, now linked to Zionist expansionism.”

Much like the rise of the BJP in India on the back of the new middle class steeped in conservatism in the country’s politically sterile Hindi belt, the American white working class was on the rebound from the entitlement battles of the Blacks. Here again lies the similarity with the BJP’s electorate, which had its political ideology honed on the reaction to the entitlement struggles of the Indian Muslims.

Much like India this politics of reaction laid the foundation of private corporation driven economic liberalism in the USA beginning with the Ronald Reagan phase. Brenner writes that because the American South saw enormous growth in the 1970s but had the “weakest trade union and welfare infrastructure,” the white, working class backed the American Republican Party’s project “to construct an anti-statist individualist ideology founded on white supremacy, defence of the patriarchal family and Protestant fundamentalism.”

The result has been the decimation of the ‘left’ faction of the Democratic Party that was born on the crucible of labour rights agitations of the American trade unions since the 1920s and that had come into its own during Lyndon Jhonson’s “Great Society” experiment, which had as its goal a large “welfare state,” albeit based on high state spending in the midst of high corporate profitability.

Brenner writes that the folly of the Democratic Party of not reining corporate power resulted in the loci of politics shifting further to the right and its eventual marginalisation in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, under Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party re-emerged sans the ‘left,’ after it moved to the right and emulated the Republican Party.

He concludes by saying that the US economy has been growing on the basis of economic bubbles – first the stock market bubble of the 1990s, then the asset-price bubble as seen in the housing boom. This has led the country into the current crisis. Add to that free trade capitalism that corporate America has imposed on the country, and the dimensions of American misfortune appear bigger than Bush’s plaints about rising food and fuel prices. It signals the tectonic shifts taking place in world politics.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in