We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

A Primer: USAID & US Hegemony

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

The author provides an excellent explanation of the role of USAID, in contrast to military invasions, as the most effective strategy of maintaining control of other nations.
By controlling these aspects in any given population, one then controls that population itself. It is the key to not only defeating an “insurgency,” it is also the key to running a successful insurgency oneself. USAID projecting its influence into any given nation is in fact a sort of insurgency – a literal attempt to take control of a government – however incremental and patient the nature of that insurgency might be.

Areas included in US counterinsurgency manuals as essential to control include (but are not limited to):

  •     police and fire services,
  •     water,
  •     electricity
  •     education and training,
  •     transportation,
  •     medical,
  •     sanitation,
  •     banking,
  •     agriculture,
  •     labor relations,
  •     manufacturing and,
  •     construction
What few social critics understand is that this is precisely how any ruling class of people take control of a society whether that class of people are known as monarchist/aristocrats, autocrats, bureaucratic class, military dictatorship, or capitalists. They must take control of all these institutions (ideological institutions are most important in the long term and control over the rest in the short term) if they are going to rule very long--and they know that. It's fairly easy to see how USAID functions in a relatively short time span, but it is much more difficult to see the same process that evolves over hundreds of years as is the case with capitalism. 

This is because the capitalist system has required this length of time to evolve into its ultimate destiny: the concentration of wealth in a few hands. It's obvious that the concentration of wealth translates readily into power/control/domination. That is the end result of capitalist class rule which we see wrecking havoc on societies and the environment nearly everywhere in the world. More dreadfully, we are now faced with the imminent prospect of human extinction via a nuclear conflagration and/or environmental destruction.