<nettime> Global policeman threatens strike

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Dateline: USSA, 21st century futures

Dispatch: Global policeman threatens strike

Main text:

Can Amerika's first black president use his Nobel Peace Prize to lead a 
war-weary country into yet another display of technological prowess by 
the military-industrial complex? Will the horrific Syrian gas weapons be 
destroyed by a yet more horrific arsenal? Or will the "strike to end all 
strikes" succeed for the umpteenth time in relaunching Amerika's 
post-WWII vocation: global market domination by a permanent war economy?

The increasingly likely alternative is that the global policeman goes on 
strike.

[Image: the Leaning Tower of Pershing Missile]

Let's be clear: I don't know how many people think the use of chemical 
weapons is a detail, but this reporter is not one of them. However, the 
question that millions of Homeland residents are asking is: Why fight 
another war for the military-industrial tycoons? The Afghanistan and 
Iraq wars devastated the countries where they are still taking place, 
they mangled the future of the USSA, and they have given rise to a 
situation where Al-Qaeda and similar forces appear most likely to profit 
from any overthrow of the Assad regime. The likelihood of Obamageddon 
passing the Congressional vote is meager, if still deadly real.

Typically, workers go on strike for higher wages, as WalMart and 
fast-food slavers are doing right now all over the USSA. A strike (or 
stand-down, if you prefer) by the global policeman would be different. 
On the one hand, Amerikkkan credibility does threaten to collapse. If 
the constantly reignited threat of continuous global conflict cannot be 
maintained by shocking and awesome spectacles of destruction from the 
skies, then the world's major regions and the fictional "global 
community" would have to find other modes of coexistence than the 
imperial order that has prevailed (with continuous enlargement and 
adjustment) since the end of WWII. This would augur tremendous, 
potentially destabilizing changes, make no mistake about that either. 
Back in the Homeland, the subliminal message is known by all: "If Empire 
collapses, so will the corporate engines of Amerikan prosperity." Ever 
since Roosevelt transformed Detroit into the "arsenal of democracy" 
we've been made to worship (cokes and burgers in hand) at the drive-in 
theater of the Colossus.

But you can go on strike for other reasons than higher pay. You can go 
on strike for peace in your communities. You can go on strike for a halt 
to abusive practices both at home and abroad. You can go on strike for a 
more sustainable ecological order. You can go on strike for new forms of 
co-development. You can go on strike for the end of domination by the 
corporate-military-financial class. And all that is hardly opposite to 
higher wages! Especially when you consider how radically low they are 
today. Life in the USSA could be so much better. Yet every time it looks 
like that might happen, they start another war. Which has always been a 
War to End All Wars, a War to Save Democracy.

[Image: "I can't live on $7.25 an hour!"]

The global policeman is threatening a strike. The WalMart/fast-food 
workers are staging more of them every week. Could the times they 
finally be a'changin'?





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