January 21, 2005

Destroy to Win

When we refer to the right wing, we assume that we are discussing people who want to make a profit and who prefer to do it in a traditional monopolistic way.
That's not what we are confronting now. If what's guiding business now has any tradition, it only goes back a couple of decades to the "discovery" of "creative destruction," an economic theory that looks at the world, sees that there is a certain amount of destruction involved in the process of creation and concludes that creation can be maximized by helping destruction along.
In other words, these people think that failure is a good thing and, if it doesn't happen on its own, the best thing is to promote it. Businesses are meant to fail so that others, like vultures, can benefit from the destruction the predators have wrought.
This attraction to failure is what puts them on a collision course with government, which is specifically designed not to fail. In other words, government functions need to be privatized so they can be made to fail and the vultures (speculators in the market) can pick up the pieces cheap. Every failure is an opportunity for someone else. Just like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean was an opportunity for the United States military and the hurricanes in South Florida were an opportunity for the construction and insurance industries and the increasing rate of cancer is an opportunity for the medical services industry.
If you look at it from this point of view, it's apparent that the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure was part of the plan--a planned opportunity for the corporations that specialize in rebuilding things. Indeed, the whole enterprise is not very different from the process we knew in the seventies and eighties as urban renewal. Then too, large segments of the inner cities were destroyed on the promise that they would be rebuilt better than new. That the communities destroyed in the process would never come back was not even considered. Except after the fact; when their desertion of an untenable situation was blamed for the failure of the urban centers to rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Indeed, the promise that democracy would flower in Iraq just as soon as Saddam's infrastructure was destroyed seems an exact replica of the process, were it not for the use of tanks and gunships and tons of munitions.

Posted by Hannah at January 21, 2005 07:22 AM
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