Auto Bailout
My major prof from grad school and I used to spend a lot of time talking about nationalism and economic development. That was done in several contexts. One of those was the context of elites who served the interests of international capital rather than national interest. You could have entire regions, millions of people who were thrown into or deeper into poverty and debt while a tiny fraction of the elites enriched themselves and their U.S. and European corporate puppet masters via the power of national government–power that they usually hadn’t come by in a truly democratic election.
Today, MSNBC is reporting that Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm has called a segment of southern, conservative senators “unamerican”. That’s a heated term and one that we’re used to seeing right wingers throw around. I think, in a very real sense, she’s right. My major prof and I used to talk about “the Latin Americanization” of the U.S. What we meant by that was the ways in which neo-liberalism was turning the U.S. into a nation with an obscenely wealthy minority who lived on estates in gated communities while the number of poor increases and the middle class shrinks (among other things). These southern senators are doing exactly what the elites of Latin America have done for a hundred years. They’re serving the interests of foreign corporate capital (Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Hyundai) at the expense of the national interest. If they succeed, they’ll reduce the standard of living for hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans.
