Dear Gegenstandpunkters,

If I correctly understand what I’ve read of yours so far, you reject any constructive criticism of society because it seeks to improve a system that needs to be abolished. In your articles, you offer evidence that society’s evils are due to the system and that the state, Keynesianism, the World Bank, the UN, etc. cannot remedy them.

And America wants to do a particularly thorough job in that part of the world where it has spotted the worst shortcomings: the Arab-Islamic world between Morocco and Afghanistan — a place the United States sees as being defined by the presence of a strong anti-Americanism. It has undertaken to combat this nuisance by military force wherever necessary, and has also initiated a comprehensive set of reforms aimed at bringing the virtues of free enterprise, democratic customs and the bourgeois rule of law to this troubling region.

Without a free market economy, a category five storm certainly would not have been prevented, but only with one could death and destruction on the south coast of the United States have come to such a magnitude. Actually, the responsible government agencies had rather early information that a hurricane of force five was moving on the Louisiana coast. And how did they react to this?

At least as far as the domestic agenda is concerned, the program for good governance has been settled all over Europe. All the nations that have become rich and important through their market economy, and want to remain so, need reforms. The necessity of these reforms is beyond doubt. The respective government leaders, otherwise committed to conserving their community in the face of disturbing changes, have themselves let it be known that there can be “no alternative” to the “trenchant,” “fundamental,” “extensive,” “permanent,” et cetera, reforms that they are planning. A state of emergency has come to the fore: the state’s budget is ailing, “the economy” is stagnating, and Europe’s important sites for capital investment aren’t what they used to be. All this demands state decrees that do away with disastrous hindrances to the nation’s business life. The damage done to the public good, which — as national budget, economic growth, and success in global competition — is supposed to be guaranteed by proper governmental action, has been found to be the undoubted result of expenses ponied up for the livelihood of people who either work, or else do not carry out this service due to their established uselessness.

If one were to believe the dogma of the apostles who pronounce that economic reason alone rules in, and only in, a market economy; and if one were to believe their analysis of recent events in the stock market; then it is evident that for some time now, sheer greed for money has dominated one of the most important, supposedly forward-looking sections of the market economy; and led to a horrendous overreaction in the wake of all sorts of fraudulent insider schemes; in other words, to an extreme overvaluation of so-called growth stocks; which has now been punished by an “astronomical elimin

A small-scale cultural war has broken out in the feature pages of Europe’s newspapers. The authors are taken aback by the militant way in which America has begun to reorder the world. They are repulsed by the narrow-minded partisanship with which the majority of U.S. citizens support war and vent their hatred at the enemies and opponents of America’s wars. They are delighted by every critical voice emerging from the United States that has something — anything — to criticize about the “stupid white men” in charge.

When the German foreign minister regrets the loss of moral leadership on the part of the United States of America, and demands that it be immediately reinstituted; when Italian politicians from the opposition call for a withdrawal of their troops in view of the published cases of abuse; when Polish members of government contemplate the same, and when in the eyes of Bush’s rival for the presidency, the honor of the military is impaired by the wrong leaders, then it is quite obvious that a moral scandal is being turned into a political means.

“This unprecedented assault brought us face to face with a new enemy, and demanded that we think anew and act anew in order to protect our citizens and our values.” (Attorney General John Ashcroft before the U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, “Oversight of the Department of Justice,” May 25, 2002)

After 9/11, the U.S. government decreed the necessity of “thinking anew” the nation’s domestic security.

I recently received a letter from a friend of mine in a developing country. An article from a famous local poet was attached, and in this article the poet offered his explanations for the causes of poverty. The poet found, among other things, the people’s own laziness, their lacking industriousness and the indolence and corruption of the ruling politicians all to be at fault for this poverty. As a solution, he recommended strict and disciplined education, so-called “character-building,” in order to alter the people’s mentality.

What goes for all the important institutions of the capitalist world goes for the World Trade Organization (WTO) too: hardly anybody wants to praise it. Those who wish to radiate global economic expertise like to rebuke it for its ‘conceptual weakness,’ its sorry willingness to compromise, its biased and wrong decisions, and the like. They worry about the excessive ‘influence of national egoism,’ and reproach it for its ‘failure.’ In all this, they are really only confirming their indestructible good faith in the WTO as an organization that actually exists to put the brakes on the ruinous competition between states, to bring about consensus in global trade and fairly distribute its blessings; in any case as a definite achievement. The expert commentary on the WTO conference in Seattle conformed to this line of thinking, a conference that was supposed to initiate a new ‘round’ of ‘liberalized’ cross-border business and yet didn’t even manage to create an agenda. Consistent with this, they reproached the — for whatever reasons — hostile demonstrators in Seattle for their ignorance of the true humanitarian mission of the organization; they feared narrow-minded national resistance to the perfectly good purpose of the conference; and they regretted the failure of the conference while expressing the hope that the flagging process of beneficent ‘deregulation’ of global business might continue as soon as possible under the aegis of the WTO as a kind of supranational regulatory authority. A quasi-legal authority over states for supervising the liberality of worldwide moneymaking just doesn’t seem at all paradoxical, or at least suspect, to global economic experts. They consider something like that in principle to be perfectly reasonable, even if its troubles — in this case the failed result of the conference — conspicuously reveal this organization to be about nothing but power struggles over trade policy — even with the drawing up of an agenda for future conferences — and show the widely welcomed “liberalization of world trade” to be nothing other than a pseudonym for the protection provided by the strongest economic powers for their national interests.