TO
Nine days before the presidential elections, the war impulse dominates and permeates the entire American society immersed in a process of intellectual decadence. This imperial nihilistic drive, as Emmanuel Todd calls it, is driven by the tension strategy
of the Deep state –the secret parallel government organized by the security and intelligence apparatus, and made up of representatives of the main corporations of the military-industrial-financial-digital complex that directs foreign and defense policy in the US beyond democratic appearances–, and could result, based on the situation and regardless of the victory of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the November 5 elections, in a totalitarian capitalism
since both factions promote a model that, facilitated by the financialization of the economy, is based on the extraction of rents and the systematic impoverishment of the majority.
This is a process that Sheldon Wolin described at the beginning of the century as inverted totalitarianism
a form of domination where democratic institutions are maintained in appearance, but are empty of real content, controlled entirely by a parasitic economic elite. A rapacious capitalism where politics becomes a farce and democratic rights are abolished, and which, as Karl Polanyi warned in The great transformation (1944), leads to the demolition of society
within the framework of a mafia-like capitalism and political system.
As Maciek Wisniewski pointed out in The Daythere is a line of imperial continuity, not rupture, between the administrations of the fascist
Trump (as Kamala Harris called him at a campaign event) and Joe Biden, whose foreign policy, to the liking of the extreme right and American neoconservatism and promoter of the proto-fascist regimes of Ukraine and Israel, is on the way to making the world more closer to World War III than the convicted New York tycoon has ever been.
In this context, Chris Hedges warns that there is a civil war
in the making within plutocratic capitalism, between different factions of an economic-financial elite that drains resources from society to concentrate them in a few hands, with Harris as the visible face of the corporate power
of the manufacturing and agricultural sector, which needs stability and a technocratic government, but which also has the endorsement of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, who control a vast portion of the world economy, and key figures in technology and finance, such as Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn and director of Microsoft, Roger Altman, former official of Lehman Brothers and current director of the bank Evercore, and Reed Hastings, president of Netflix.
In turn, Trump is described as the buffoonish mascot of a oligarchic power
prone to a neo-feudalism, which brings together the capitalism of warlords and extreme right demagogues (Johnson, Meloni, Modi, Orban, Le Pen), and that, like the venture capital companies that cannibalize the nation (Apollo , Blakstone, Carlyle Group) and billionaires Elon Musk, leader of Tesla and SpaceX (which builds a network of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office), closely linked to the Pentagon and the CIA, who has advocated further deregulating the market by supporting a vision of Silicon Valley that seeks creative destruction
and through America PAC he has spent more than 75 million dollars on the Trump campaign; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Facebook, In-Q-Tel and Palantir, whose AI-based predictive policing systems Israel uses to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; oil tycoons Timothy Dunn and Harold Hamm, and Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, who according to Open Secrets has spent $129 million on the Republican’s campaign, all of whom thrive on chaos and, as Steve Bannon says, deconstruction of the administrative state
.
Perhaps it is for this reason that, in separate letters, the vice president and Democratic candidate progressive
received support from old people falcons of war from the sphere of national security and establishment of the foreign policy of the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and Jr. and Trump, among whom are, according to James Carden, former advisor to the Bilateral Presidential Commission between the US and Russia of the State Department, war criminals
such as former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzáles, who legalized torture as an interrogation method; Eric Edelman, helmsman of the National Defense Strategy who called for increasing military spending for a multi-theater war against China and Russia; Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the former ambassador to Mexico and first director of National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte, one of the architects of the bloody interventions Americans in Latin America during the last quarter of the 20th century. Likewise, Harris received the support of partisan figures such as Hillary Clinton; Victoria Nuland, notorious for her involvement in the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the subsequent war proxy of Biden to destabilize Russia; the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, and the former directors of the CIA, Leon Panetta and John Brennan, who was also Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense.
As Carden points out, the fear that Trump will return to the White House makes progressives, liberals and the militarist elite that has led to bloody wars and interventions in the world, come together to preserve and defend the assumptions values
that they want to take away from them, as if the Republicans did not have the same imperial impulses that have dominated US politics in the last two centuries. Hence, as Hedges points out, neither of the two candidates is democratic and they use issues such as gun rights or abortion to distract the public from the civil war within the capitalist elite; Both formulas channel money into the hands of plutocracy, since they are about creating a world of masters and servants, of empowered oligarchic and corporate elites and a disempowered public. Thus, with Harris or Trump, the end result is the same.
