The One Guaranteed Winner in 2024: American Empire

The Democratic leadership seems to be most interested in self-enrichment, prestige—a liberal religion in America—and political performance. Democrats are caught up in short-term thinking, the individual wins, and they collect peanuts as they jostle with the enemy at the polls. Still, it’s enough for the occasional political victory—the maddened coordination of self-interest, special interests, and grassroots organizations produces things like Obamacare every now and then.

And yet, the question remains: how did the Democratic Party, the party whose primary orientation is the “coalition,” that is, all the parties with minorities, preside over the total destruction of Gaza? Because of the Israeli terrorist attacks in Lebanon?

As an American, focusing on celebrities, heroes and villains, money and the the sight of a large churchit is tempting to borrow a personalized analysis of the atrocities: Biden is a Zionist; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is incredulous.

And personalities are important in the history of the election year and the year of the genocide. Or a genocide year and an election year, depending on your perspective. It is doubtful that the Democrats’ dismal record over the past year would have been what it has been without Biden’s fervent, fervent, full faith and commitment to Jewish supremacy in Palestine. That the president values ​​Jewish-Israeli life more than the lives of Palestinians and Lebanese people, or even the Americansobvious. But Biden’s Zionism is not enough to explain the country’s active participation in the effort to eradicate Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip.

For most Americans, the idea of ​​empire is baroque. XIV. to Louis and II. It belongs to Lipót and the history books. Yet there is still an empire today. Consider the fact that a vote in November on bodily autonomy or climate justice or a moderately less exploitative capitalism—in other words, a vote for Democrats—still means death to others in faraway places. Subjects of empire in Palestine and Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan or elsewhere are not given a vote, but live and die, more often die, with savage regularity in the name of American empire. Their death is a monotonous, leaden beat in the distance. The question is why.

The scientist is Aziz Rana describes an empire as having three primary properties. It organizes “the world around ethno-racial hierarchy…[where] finally, the racial background shapes the expressions…[of] rights and opportunities.” It is a “world system based on economic exploitation” that ultimately produces the third characteristic, “really violent conflicts between imperial rivals.”

The traditional organization of empire has given way to a more flexible, flexible neoliberal reality in which resource denudation is coupled with the globalized privatization of industry—a legacy of the last century’s anti-colonial struggles. According to Rana, colonialism takes resources away from places, and then newly independent countries – whose organizations were formed by their former colonizers – are charged high interest rates to borrow money to develop the countries plundered by the colonizers. The result is an empire that derives its profits from public debt—often the only means of escape for low-income countries seeking to escape the poverty trap—and a military complex that earns its rent through war.

The entire analysis is only partially applicable to Palestine and the broader regional war currently underway. Is Iran, for example, really an equal rival to the United States? Or is it enough that Iranian policy threatens American hegemony in the region, as is evident?

Be that as it may, since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, the United States has nearly $18 billion was spent on military support to Israel. Most of the money stays in the US; used to buy war machines from American companies – a work program for ghouls. Raytheon Technologies stock price in the year since the genocide began escaped into the sky for shareholders. 2024 proxy statement of the country’s second largest arms dealer can be read in part“With increased global threats, there is high demand for our commercial aircraft and defense products.”

The history of the Palestinian genocide is far from being fully written. Empire, congressional appropriations and pork, the profit motive embedded in our capitalist system and billion dollar corporations, Joe Biden’s cruelty and Zionism, and the Israel lobby all play a role. But we are far from a complete understanding – too many facts remain unknown. Now, as Israel attacks Lebanon and as Iran responds to Israel’s persistent provocations, the story is only getting harder to tell.

In his short story Death and suffrageDale Bailey envisions a world in which the dead—those who have been unjustly killed, but also everyone else—come back to vote. The Supreme Court ultimately decides that voting is a right reserved for the living – a pure allegory of life in the middle of the empire, in which the votes and needs of countless dead people living in faraway places do not matter.

At the end of the story, the narrator notices:[The dead] after all, he doesn’t demand anything from us. They seek no end that we can perceive or understand…. This is how we go on, simple lodgers in a world of uninhabited graves, always subject to the merciless scrutiny of the dead.

I can’t blame those who would vote for a better life here – in the middle of the empire – by voting for the Democrats. But I can’t join them either. Genocide is very important in my life. Every moment carries with it a merciless examination of the dead.