* New: September 2010 *
Obama Offers a Share of Responsibility
for the American World Order
to the Rising World Power China
“Change” in the United States’ Policy towards East Asia
for the American World Order
to the Rising World Power China
No Comment!
Don't expect sympathetic ideas from us on whether the American education system bungles its mission of producing human capital or whether collective bargaining still has a place in the socio-political sun. It doesn't make any difference to us whether politicians go on junkets or have affairs when they govern mass poverty here and send American soldiers all over the world. We have no suggestions about what image of itself the left should project, we don't plead for better presidents in Iran or Honduras or anywhere else, nor do we draw up an alternative plan for managing the financial crisis.
We also don't uncover any scandals. Unlike Time magazine or Michael Moore's movies, “Democracy Now” or “60 Minutes,” or any other opinion-forming media, we do not maintain that cutbacks in human services, xenophobic immigration laws or the internment of prisoners at Guantanamo are aberrations from a standard – a standard which is never really valid, but is all the more demanded anyway. When we reflect on the so-called events of the day, we always notice the opposite: the necessity with which these events, and how they happen, belong to democracy and the free-market economy, to the world order and to all the other great addressees of the general will for improvement and beautification. We recognize in these events only cases and sub-cases of the principles and objective compulsions which are really in force and which enjoy a frighteningly good reputation in this society as the highest human rights. If our explanations suggest a certain cynicism, then that is quite correct: this is exactly what it is when American competitiveness consistently leads precisely to the poverty whose extreme cases then shock even its architects, so that the normal poverty thus becomes in line with morality.
What is to be expected from us has nothing to do with original ideas. We don't try to see everything a little bit differently, to add an alternative viewpoint and contribute to the red white and blue spirit of the times. There is too much of this already; the spokespeople of the democratic public are continuously busy submitting reminders and improvement suggestions to their audience and its rulers; and the pluralism of the points of view from which all this takes place – in the name of the environment, social justice or even just the “shock” which spreads across the land – is already big enough. Deliberately and recklessly, they supply interpretations of events which are digestible only by minds with an unreserved bias in support of the system. We offer something else: explanations of really existing capitalism; therefore arguments against this “best of all systems.”