Who benefits from the new imperialism?
The knock-them-down, build-them-up-policies that have since characterized U.S. military and reconstruction campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are of great benefit to two major sectors of the American economy, energy and defense, which happen to have supplied much of the campaign funding and many of the key figures for the present Republican adminstration. But in terms of the neoliberal globalization of the past two decades, the sudden release of capitalism from two-dimensional space limitations to its three-dimensional breakthrough, to its ability to buy cheap labor and materials everywhere on earth, characterized by the spread of computerized technology, social dumping on distant continents and the concomitant decline in labor costs for the manufacture of consumer goods — in all these terms, the energy and defense industries are economically archaic. They are dwarfed by the giant manufacturers of electrical appliances, cars, computer and telecom equipment and apparel and by the burgeo
