B-52s based in Britain during the Gulf war. So Bush could flatten Libya at will, although
this by itself will hardly save Wall Street or reverse the steady erosion of Bush's domestic
political support. Were Bush to order an occupation of the interior of Libya, this beau
geste would entail the risk of guerilla warfare on the part of the fierce Senussi. But
perhaps the Anglo-Americans now consider themselves invincible in the desert, and wish
to use Libya as a pilot project for their scheme of re-establishing colonialism in the third
world, perhaps under the cover of new United Nations trusteeship territories administered
by London and Washington using the fig-leaf of the Trusteeship Council. This would
delight the City of London, and might keep oil cheap, but it does not seem likely to
capture the imagination of millions of unemployed workers. Still, an assault on Libya
might be on the agenda as part of an October surprise crescendo, or perhaps as a quick fix
to stave off George's final Hooverization.
It should be carefully noted that Anglo-American aggression in the name of the New
World Order is in no way an epiphenomenon of George Bush's personal political
desperation. To understand the interaction between Bush's will to power and the broader
imperatives of the Anglo-American finance establishment, a comparison to Nazi
Germany is unavoidable. Like German finance of the 1930's, Anglo-American finance
today revolves around a mass of paper promissory notes in the form of stocks, bonds,
mortgages, debentures, plus public, corporate, and consumer debt, and the open-ended
obligations of such agencies as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the
Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. In 1989, the paper promises to pay amounted to
some $24 thousand billion dollars for the US alone. Anglo-American finance is therefore
bankrupt.
German finance in the mid-1930's was similarly bankrupt. After some initial economic
measures for the stabilization of the Nazi regime had been implemented, the only
available means of shoring up the German financial structure was through the
cannibalization and looting of the labor force, industrial equipment, infrastructure, and
raw materials of the neighboring countries. The brutal plundering of the economic
potential of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, France,
Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and large parts of the Soviet Union was
designed to appropriate the national wealth of these states as a de facto subsidy to the
German Mark in the same way that the oil price arrangements associated with Operation
Desert Storm or the continental free market of the North American Free Trade
Agreements are designed to subsidize the US dollar. The scientific term for such
appropriation is primitive accumulation. Thus, the aggressive adventures of the Bush
family protege Adolf Hitler were a product of the complex interplay between the
primitive accumulation requirements of the German banking and insurance system on the
one hand, and the political-demagogic needs of the Nazi dictatorship on the other. The
overriding imperative was to extend the sphere of primitive accumulation as far and as
fast as possible. That proved possible until the eastern front developments of 1942-43.
When outward expansion was halted, and even more so when the sphere of primitive
accumulation contracted under outside military pressure, the pressure for more and more
intensive primitive accumulation became overwhelming. The typical austerity of this
system was the concentration camp, where the flesh and bones of the inmates was sapped