AMERICA: THE THIRD WORLD FOURTH REICH
Durt Fibo, November 8, 2024
The year 2024 suffered elections in some 70 countries holding around half the world’s population, in which most centrist and even conservative parties lost more ballots than ever to extreme right-wing gangs, with the greatest loss bringing the resurrection of Donald Trump in the United States. Juggling anti-globalist slogans like grenades, fraudulent ‘populists’ have entranced enough of the citizenry to vote away their few remaining rights, leaving the actual majority of humanity in shock –as though this had been unpredictable. Straining their brains, many prattlers and prognosticators are murmuring that this upheaval marks the end of neoliberalism. -Such declarations are as worthless as Fukuyama’s announcing “the end of history” when the Berlin Wall was breached and neoliberalism gushed through the opening. The world is simply being disfigured in another natural spasm of the capitalist system.
The origins of society in essence came about to protect mankind from the vicissitudes of nature. Once society expands from that raison d’être, it becomes a mechanism for organizing destruction. Capitalism is historically described as the victor in a bloody battle against feudalism. But, like all conquering social orders, it retained much of the proceeding one. And, in truth, that war was never completed, with feudalistic effluent always surging back in to the undercrofts of the capitalist superstructure. The same predilections that drive capitalism into ever fewer concentrations of wealth control are also forcing it to revert to feudalistic constrictions of social power. When the state loses its ability to control the insatiable demands of a global capitalist order, capitalism coalesces into its supremacist forms: oligarchy, autocracy, or fascism. The social order for everyone below the ruling orders resumes in turn its basic structure: feudalism. Whatever the level of a nation’s development, whichever point of the compass it hunkers in, we are once again serfs.
For the nation-state is by now an anachronism, and in no way able to govern when the world has succumbed to supra-national capital. If anyone believes that the nation-state -that is, the structure- can protect its citizens from global capital, they are being inattentive. If they are hoping that a state’s institutions -its mechanisms- can preserve basic functions and protections, they are being more sentimental than realistic. But, for the immediate present, wrestling with the institutions and bureaucracies constitutes the daily existence and only aspirations of most people, and holding on to them for a few more days is the only victory over totalitarianism. –A purely provisional tactic.
Parties and governments of the Social Democratic spectrum have always tried to save capitalism from itself, through democratic means. But even the earliest political observers saw that the capitalist economic system itself led to inequity and anti-democratic hierarchies. The refrain that either one – capitalism or democracy- fostered the other was a lie like any other advertising jingle. The natural trajectory of capitalism pulls all around it away from democracy. Fascism is one of the purest forms of capitalism asserting itself by undemocratic means.
The most deleterious election of 2024 was the revealing return of Trump to the Presidency. A constant object of ridicule to the rest of the world, the USA nevertheless exercises the kind of total influence over it that a massive planet exerts on smaller ones. The present scrambling of financial power is an after-effect of the global economic collapse set off by the 2008 American bank derivatives’ tectonic collision with reality. The world as a whole was and is still staggered by the misalignment –an obliquity- as ‘austerity’ measures buried the general population while the culpable parties were rescued –and resettled to where the wealth would pile in. This was even more luxurious than before their ‘crisis’. A sizable number of the sinking classes sensed that political groupings standing for the status quo were in fact touting the status quo ante which had brought the catastrophe about, thus warping chronological and social verities. Slap-happy from their pummelings, citizens everywhere began to dread the centrist position and look for an authoritarian referee who could call a halt to the fight and let them crawl off still alive.
So what did happen to the vaunted and mis-named but still grinning neoliberalism? To answer this, we must first recount its origins and growth. I have met people who think it was instituted by Reagan and Thatcher, but in fact the first nation acknowledged as performing this trick was the unfortunate Chile, under the murderous Augosto Pinochet –a dictator, not an elected ‘representative’ of any kind of liberal state. The Chilean monster was born some 20 years before that in the anti-Keynesian opium dens of errant academics who lent their visions to the post-war American power center, which decided to incubate the beast under the guise of State Department foreign aid programs. Specifically, Latin Americans were put to study economics at the University of Chicago, MIT and Harvard, their endeavors paid for by US agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, the Agency for International Development, and the Ford, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations. Later it was admitted that the CIA was very much involved in these schemes.
The US’s own 1975 Senate investigation was able to discover a dragon’s horde of proofs of American covert actions executed to form the world to their best business advantage. It was the same senatorial committee that learned how President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile to block Salvador Allende from power or overthrow him. Making the economy scream is even today one of the requisite means of impoverishing people while generating gargantuan profits for businessmen and producing a savior party –backed by those same businessmen- to snatch political control with promises of ameliorating the agony. Long after the Senate ended its performance, slowly, through numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, other declassified records were grudgingly made public, revealing, amongst other things: National Security Council strategy papers recording efforts to economically “destabilize” and isolate Allende’s government between 1970 and 1973; Communications between US and Chilean business operators, US intelligence agencies, and the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger; State Department, NSC and even FBI documents post-coup, documenting state terrorism and human rights atrocities by the Pinochet regime. In charge of creating the first genuine neoliberal state were the disciples of the aforementioned US ‘aid’ programs who became known as The Chicago Boys.
One year after the Chilean coup d’état, Chile, under the guidance of the Chicago Boys had the highest inflation rate on Earth and the highest unemployment of the past three governments –more than three times as high. Its “recessions” came at the pace of twice per eight years. Seven years after the Nixonian empire, impressed by the Chilean machine’s ability to concentrate political, military and monetary wealth in such a reliable overclass while killing off so large a population of undesirable riffraff, the dim-witted Ronald Reagan and the equally ignorant Margaret Thatcher formally adopted the bastard U.S. monstrosity as the model youth of capitalism’s future. One of the jesters who helped invent neoliberalism and sell it to Reagan was the Austrian, Stefan Possony, who also went on to sell Reagan the unworkable Strategic Defense Initiative –derided as “Star Wars”. Four years after Reagan rotted away, Bill Clinton steamed into the US Presidency by jettisoning any traditionally liberal parts of the social program while taking aboard the buccaneers of the even more reactionary conservatives. Clinton’s power-seizing strategy was aped by Tony Blair in 1997 then Gerhard Schröder in 1998. Other nominally left-leaning parties also scrambled for membership in the Clinton-christened “Third Way,” which in every instance brought about violent maimings of social safety structures and fundamental survival arrangements, all forced through as “necessary modernizations.”
Throughout that period, additional key manipulators had been pillaging their way to the center of Western capitalism; The World Bank and particularly the International Monetary Fund had enjoyed their early years stripping Third World countries, and, later, Former East Bloc nations of natural and industrial assets, while bludgeoning them into interminable debt agreements coincidentally requiring that they rebuild their societies exactly how the worst of the West was rigged, and those institutions were now ready to inflict their practices upon the developed world. Their invasion of Europe proper was crowned by the conquest of Greece, although some of the most adamant diktats came from the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
Economists are summoned like goblins to justify, usually retroactively, but sometimes like knucklebone readers, the material conditions of life for the rich. Formally, it was in 1938, in the dark days of WWII, that a congress of such economists established what became known as neoliberalism, which became the dogma of deregulation, privatization, austerity raids on pensions and social services, elimination of price controls, and the opening of all means to the limitless accumulation of capital power and profit. After it was established in Chile, the global aims of The Chicago Boys were assisted by Harvard colleagues such as Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs rose from choreographing Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer’s national tragedy in 1985 to bringing his “shock therapy” to the ex- East Bloc by 1989. A year into his efforts in Bolivia, around of quarter of the population could find no work and virtually every social welfare program had been erased, while the normal citizens’ purchasing power had plummeted down 70 percent. In 1991, Sachs, fresh from instituting his shock therapy in Poland, began working with a Russian group who had been collaborating on proposals to turn the Soviet Union into Western-style market economy. That gaggle included Anatoly Chubais and Dmitri Vasiliev; by 1991 money raised by the team (allegedly by farming tulips) helped elect a new mayor of Lenningrad: Anatoly Sobchak, Vladimir Putin’s primary political mentor. In 1992, Sobchak convened a St.Petersburg conference for the purpose of opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members were CEOs of major US and European companies. Sobchak’s co-sponsor was that veteran of the Chilean mauling: Henry Kissinger. In fact, the summit was known as “the Kissinger-Sobchak commission to promote Western investment in Russia.” As in Poland, the shock therapy commenced with the almost overnight conversion of all public property and assets to private ownership. The population shrank to wartime levels due to deprivation and a near-total loss of the little they’d had under the state just days before. Russia became a slaughterhouse, blood roaring through the streets as a civil war was fought to secure the positions of the new capitalist class. It was that torrent of blood that finally scared the Americans out of the land, and set Putin’s mafia state astride Eurasia. For, befuddled and inept as they might’ve seemed, the Russians understood the most basic form of capitalism by sheer instinct –or from old Hollywood films: gangsterism.
As the end of WWII centralized world-wide military and socioeconomic power in the USA, the rest of the globe had to stampede themselves to keep apace with it. Through coups, wars, investment obligations or corporate desires to spread cultural flummery, the American model was anointed as the only one to emulate. The sole apparent alternatives were the Soviet monolith, mauled by Stalin and fueled by state-owned capitalism, or the meager Third World way, also entangled in the established monetary system. But that American Saturnalia barely lasted 30-odd years. The subsequent Bacchanalian model America imposed on the world is now losing consciousness after scarcely 40 years of inebriated orgies. The administrative adjuncts of both refuse to disband though, and the appetite for profit and influence continues to grow ever faster among the proprietary class. No mob will simply lay down their arms, walk away from their money, and give up their turf. But, in every case, the economic overhaul depended on the most authoritarian governing structure. In every situation this diminished the lives and lifespans of average people. Street-level civilians were starved. Unions were massacred. In most cases the restructuring, privatizations and sell-offs led to business involvement beneficial to the United States. The exceptions were those few entities which terrified the Americans and fought blood-soaked wars amongst themselves to consolidate their own new capitalist-feudal orders.
The niceties of establishing total neoliberal power in a nation, as we can see, requires demolishing the institutions which regulate the vaudeville of an outdated democracy and replacing them with a repressive military-style organization pretending to be a government. The planning for this has usually been assigned to the same pseudo-academic/business-intelligence fraternities as those who concocted neoliberalism. Immediately upon Reagan’s first Presidential victory, the Heritage Foundation presented him with what they called their “Mandate for Leadership”. When Der Koolschrank published the Heritage Foundation’s dreaded Project 2025 more than two years ago (see Mein Kramp), it emphasized that this cocktail-slurping country club fantasy for annihilating and replacing the government with a Fourth Reich was designed to be implemented by ANY figurehead president. In the 1981 case, Reagan, being an empty snarl of a poor actor was naturally receptive, and integrated much of the script into his engagement, and the now-named ‘Think Tanks’, of which the Heritage is but one, thus elevated themselves as the Grand Viziers of neoliberalism in the United States. In 2016, Trump, being a friendless, meaningless, splodge of protoplasm, was seen as equally suitable to that year’s volume of the “Mandate for Leadership.”
“Make the economy scream” was Nixon’s order to attack in 1970. And the same command was issued in 2020 by the modern oligarchs in the USA, with the same results: the impoverishment of the people while simultaneously engorging the capitalist class at a mind-reeling pace, and the same capitalists who shot prices up to the stratosphere just coincidentally happen to be the ones who fund and win new governments formed according to their demands for de facto authority. The Biden administration, like other world governments, neglected to fight this assault with price controls. For his own country, Nixon himself enacted them in 1971 to assure his re-election, as did Presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Roosevelt before him. Most western democracies have this simple solution at hand, but have been too paralyzed by what they thought would be a forever neoliberal world order to enact it. In the US, it is still possible through edicts of the Council of Economic Advisers (which exists as a government agency today, within the Executive Office of the President).
When basic food prices double in the space of a year -which anyone not bearing the lobotomy scars of an ‘economist’ knows is 100% inflation, but which the economists claim is only between 2.4 and 3.2 per cent inflation- any incumbent party will be voted out of office, for, when that continues year after year, inaction becomes inexcusable. The Polyphemi who drove up those prices are the same ones who backed the parties which did win elections because people can’t eat. Voters will burn down their own houses and run naked through saw grass rather than re-elect parties which allowed this desperate and hopeless situation to come about.
Keeping in mind the gravitational power America has on the rest of the world, we can see in advance what effects the re-election of Trump will have around the globe. His triumphal return to Washington was paid for by the supra-national capital described above and paved by personal friends such as Putin and Netanyahu waging mad wars to preserve their own power and turn western democracies against their few non-rightist parties.
But the much-feared World War Three will not be ignited in Gaza or Ukraine, nor the Taiwan Strait or the Gulf of Oman, nor the Baltic borders or Balkan badlands. Nor any other regional cauldron, because it is already burning, and the epicenter is in the USA itself. So, as the new year crashes into our lives we must salute the 76 million stupefied people who voted to make America the world’s premier Third World Fourth Reich. What have you done? The men who created money have scraped the last dollar off your skeletons. Those same men have hacked the flesh of the planet off to feast on it. Rights were for years ignored instead of codified into actual law. You are a nation of ghost towns because no one can buy a hammer or nail, yet shelter’s unobtainable so people die in the streets. Your food is as poisoned as your courts. You have no health care –only a weevil-plague of insurance companies. From day through night, your lives run a Möbius strip of futility, paved with your own ordure.
You have constructed a culture of idiocy; your press has been degraded to lifestyle publications, modeled on Self Adulation Inc. or Der Stürmer, either version with its own idiolect and informational void; your technologies are retrograde and crippling; your search engines are closed caskets; your attempts to converse with the world around you have been garroted by social media run by a couple of freaks; one resembling an escaped gorilla, the other a malignant humanoid whose very face says “I will do ANYTHING to fuck up your life”; your business failures are so enormous and so inevitable that you call them successes; your neighbor would rather shoot you than say “good morning”. You will now be a classical failed state at the mercy of a government composed of bellicose ignoramuses. Your society has been boiled down to organized torture, and individuals are randomly assigned a slow or a quick death. America is an extermination camp.