Abstract
Given the crises of overproduction inherent in free market competition, and mindful of the power of colonialization and economic neo-colonialization to forestall such crises, many capitalist economies, led by the US, have resorted to strategic interventions in supposedly free market competition. These include, collusion with asset stripping Russian oligarchs, militaristic resource grabs, and sanctions targeting regimes resistant to neo-colonialization. Additionally there has been massive government financial intervention in the market, taking the form of tariffs, bailouts, subsidies, financial guarantees, and the like, not only rendering the insistence that Chinese competitors have an unfair advantage on account of their governments support derisory, but which, resulting in substantial increases to national debt, has consequently diminished government’s capacity to invest in infrastructural and technological innovation that might otherwise boost competitive production.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin, at the urging of the US, was encouraged to prop up the economy by selling off or privatizing the vast resources of a state that had presided over nine time zones; resources which, acquired by the oligarchs at fire sale prices through nefarious practices—including, but not limited to, rigged tenders and auctions, bribes, murder and ensuing treats to the apparatchiks of the bureaucracy responsible for setting the prices of such assets—could then be sold on at comparatively modest prices to the West, where they then played a significant role in fueling the US economic boom of the 1990s.
- 2.
Those skeptical of the claim that the invasion of Iraq was about the oil might do well to consider that the US and Britain were the two nations in the world with, at that time, and for different reasons, the greatest redundant oil extraction capacity, and, arguably, expertise, while the invasion was opposed by France, China, and Russia, which is to say the three nations with oil extraction contracts with Iraq. Furthermore, it will be remembered that, while around 30 or so corpses per day, bearing signs of the most hideous tortures, were being dumped on the streets of Baghdad, a circumstance to which US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s response was that “Democracy is messy,” the invading forces’ number one priority was the securing and protection of the oil wells, and that US occupation chief Paul Bremer’s first act was to pass a series of orders and laws, which the interim government was specifically prohibited from changing, opening up Iraq’s oil reserves to direct foreign ownership. Clearly then, while debatably not a sufficient cause of the Iraq war, the attempt to acquire oil appears indisputably to have been a necessary condition thereof. [For a fuller account of all this see Simon Glynn, Deconstructing Terrorism, in Philosophical Forum Quarterly, vol. xxxvi, No.1. Spring 2005, pp. 113–128. See also, Chapter 19, footnote 3.] while the recent abandoning of Kurdish forces, one of the US’s closest allies in the fight against the Islamic State, in Northern Syria, to a Turkish, anti-Kurdish, military offensive, and the subsequent return of US troops to Eastern Syria where most of Syria’s oil fields are, can leave little doubt as to US priorities and motivation.
- 3.
Including, but by no means limited to, fossil fuel resources, which will surely be replaced by ambient solar, wind, wave, tidal, current, and more conventional hydroelectric, energy resources as soon as the power of vested interests in the oil, gas, and coal industries to influence political decision-making is diminished, as it is surely already on the verge of being, as—despite the capacity of the fossil fuel industry to externalize so much of its real costs, nevertheless—many renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels.
- 4.
See Nomi Prins, It Takes a Pillager, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009.
- 5.
Crony capitalism, in that, as we have seen, much of the wealth accruing to the economic elite derives from their capacity to influence the political elite, and therefore to ensure state intervention on their behalf, in exchange for campaign contributions, not to mention consultancy fees, revolving door appointments and the like.
- 6.
The bogusness of this claim was never made more clearly apparent than it was by the great recession, where the “Triple A” ratings given to wholly inferior securitized debt obligations, and the extensive hedging, via credit default swaps, and so on, against the massive risk this implied, were, or at least so we are told and encouraged to believe, apparently entirely unrecognized even by regulators, much less investors!
- 7.
Unfunded US liabilities include such demand stimulants as Social Security, veterans and federal employees’ benefits and Medicare, as well as publically held federal debt.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Glynn, S. (2020). Overt Abandonment of the Free Market: Government Geostrategic (Military) and Economic, International and National Intervention. In: The Economic Logic of Late Capitalism and the Inevitable Triumph of Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52666-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52667-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)