Human Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century
HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
EDDIE J. GIRDNER
*
ABSTRACT
The spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the last quarter
century has greatly increased human insecurity. The United States became a
provider not of global security but rather insecurity. The destruction of the
environment under the established regime is often seen to be the major source
of human insecurity. At a deeper level, however, it is clear that the underlying
malady is neoliberal capitalism, the logic of which precludes addressing the
demise of the global ecosystem, poverty and hegemonic wars. Mainstream
academics have characteristically saluted the neoliberal agenda and
proceeded to reinforce and propagate the ideology underlying the deceptive
mantra that there is no alternative. Human security is sorely lacking in a
world where people are being vaporized by increasingly horrible forms of
bombs, where about half of the population make less than two US dollars a
day, where urban slum colonies proliferate, and where war budgets eat up
ever larger portions of national state budgets.
KEYWORDS
Environment, Financial Terrorism, Global Poverty, Human Security,
Neoliberalism, United States, War
*
Eddie J. Girdner, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Political Science
and International Relations, Ba
skent University, Ankara, Turkey.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 2 [VOL. XXXIX
The socialist dream was the faith that human kind would have
the wisdom not to destroy itself through capitalist greed. So far, we
cannot say that there is very much evidence that this is the case. What
we have seen in the last three decades is the unleashing of that greed
through the forcing upon the world of a system of so-called
neoliberalism. Some aspects are new but it is not liberal. Under this
regime, no effort has been spared to crush the utopian dreams, to
make sure that this faith has been discarded beyond repair never to
rise again from the ashes of its demise. The only consolation is that
the global powers pushing this new vision of global totalitarian rule
are themselves reaching their demise as history passes their
collapsing empires by. Most notably, the United States, whose power
grab on an unprecedented scale, has blown up in its face and
strengthened rival powers.
1 In late 2008, rather than provide security
to the international community, the excesses of greed on Wall Street
brought down the global financial system. After preaching to the
entire world about the need to nationalize their banks, the
Government of the United States of America was seen scrambling to
nationalize its own banks. The lesson should be obvious to
policymakers around the world.
The post World War II myth was that the US would be the
provider of global security. In fact, what history has shown is that
global empires cannot provide security even to themselves. A
superpower on the decline may become a provider of global
insecurity as its historical global declining.
Human Security and the Environment
Human security, or the security of the people, is sometimes
seen to be focused upon the environment, particularly the effects
associated with global warming from greenhouse gas emissions such
as nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. The polar ice caps
are melting faster than anyone previously imagined. Storms such as
catastrophic hurricanes are more frequent and many types of unusual
weather patterns are occurring. Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient
Truth” has brought these phenomena to the attention of the world.
1
Eddie J. Girdner, USA and the New Middle East, New Delhi, Gyan
Publishers, 2008.
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 3
No doubt these effects constitute serious threats to human
security, but of course more often to the very poor around the world
than to others. They are seriously important, but this paper will not
focus upon the environment. This is because it is a problem that in
my view is not going to be solved, although there will be a good deal
of tinkering over the problem.
This approach is quite pessimistic, but in my view, the problem
simply cannot be addressed under the present system of neoliberal
capitalism. This is because preserving and protecting the environment
contradicts the fundamental logic of profits and significant economic
growth.
2 Just to stabilize global warming, emissions would have to be
cut by some 50 percent. This is simply not going to happen under the
present global economic system. Even the most efficient countries
will not do this, much less the greenhouse gas champion of the world,
the USA. Nor will China and India significantly cut greenhouse gas
emissions, as they need a high rate of economic growth and have
massive populations. Corporate profits will always win out as long as
the present system of global economy based upon profits and
capitalist accumulation is in place.
Nor will citizen action make very much difference. Big
corporations will act quickly to neutralize efforts by more
environmentally aware citizens. Green-washing ads now paint oil
corporations, such as Shell and Exxon, as pioneers in environmental
preservation. The public relations industry has proven to be highly
effective in spreading corporate lies and business propaganda. Big
corporations cannot kill the environmental movement, but they can
partially co-opt it, using it to conceal some of their sins. When they
really meet serious challenges, they sue in courts. They move into
every niche to pollute more and increase their profits. Governments,
for the most part, act in complicity with big corporations,
encouraging them to move away from highly polluted areas and into
clean areas, so as to pollute even more. In the same way, polluting
corporations exploit ignorance and lack of environmental awareness.
When McDonalds is stopped from using ozone- damaging Styrofoam
2
Eddie J. Girdner and Jack Smith, Killing Me Softly: Toxic Waste; Corporate
Profit and the Struggle for Environmental Justice
, New York, Monthly
Review Press, 2002.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 4 [VOL. XXXIX
containers in the US by environmentalists, the company rushes the
same polluting materials to third world countries to continue to
degrade the environment the same way there. In other words, these
corporations know they are killing the earth, but they proceed to
bulldoze their way forward to kill it ever quicker to sustain their
profits. They may post some pictures of green trees as a further insult
to people’s intelligence, as British Petroleum (BP) has painted its
petrol stations with yellow and green and painted flowers upon its
walls. But without some alternative economic system which is not
based upon the logic of capitalism, we can “kiss the environment
good bye.”
Rather, this paper will focus upon a somewhat different
contradiction. The deeper malady is neoliberalism. At the same time,
there is a contradiction between “national security” and “human
security.” This is seen in war and imperialism.
Today, to focus upon “human security” is seen as something
new, but I do not really believe that this is true. In the past many
writers have focused upon this issue but have simply been ignored.
The concerns of the lesser people generally have been pushed aside
throughout history. History seldom records how many innocent
people die in the fray. This is so, it seems, because history,
international relations, international politics, and so on, have
generally been viewed from the ruling class point of view.
The Pressure to Avoid the Truth in Academia
Academics and thinkers who focus upon the truth, rather than
serving the ideological needs of the ruling class, are generally
dismissed out of hand. They will generally not be able to easily
publish, at least not in prestigious journals and presses, which they
need in order to advance their careers. Those academics who do serve
the ruling class interests and ideology and are quite quickly proven to
be wrong, usually do not suffer any negative consequences. On the
other hand, those academics who were correct all along, but unable to
publish in prominent places, will get little or no credit for being
correct.
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 5
A clear example comes to mind. Francis Fukuyama became one
of the world’s most famous scholars by pushing false and foolish
views about neoliberalism in the l990s. The new “liberal” was to be
in style from now on. “The End of History and the Last Man” had to
be mentioned by everyone as a work of great erudition. A decade
later, even the United States of America was seen to nationalizing its
major banks and the era of neoliberalism had devastated countries
and people around the world. Neoliberalism was failing in even being
able to sustain itself as a viable global economic system. It is a major
disaster economically, socially, and environmentally. It is a system
which cannot long work and is being challenged increasingly.
3 Yet,
academics like Fukuyama maintain their elite status at prestigious
universities, while those who were honest and correct in their
criticism never gain recognition. Actually, it was the Marxists who
mainly criticized Fukuyama and they have been proven correct. Yet
who has asked Professor Fukuyama to account for his predictions
which have turned out to be so erroneous. It is not seen to matter as
his ideas were put forward in good faith in his duty of shoring up the
capitalist ideology of the ruling class.
The Monthly Review school in New York very accurately
chronicled the condition of the American economy and the likely
consequences of the build-up of massive household debt in its
publications. Yet, the academic establishment, as a part of the ruling
class, often avoids acknowledging the truth about the economic
system. Economists often cling to an ideology of the free market,
when it has little to do with facts in the real world. Because of this,
universities and academics frequently neglect their duty and public
trust to make the public aware of the truth, even when it contradicts
ideology. Chalmers Johnson is one of the many exceptions to this
trend in his recent probing of the American Empire.
4 Noam Chomsky,
known around the world, but not very well in America is another
example. Joseph Stiglitz in his criticism of IMF programs and the
disaster of the inordinate costs of the American-led wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq is another example of honest scholarship,
3
Eddie J. Girdner and Kalim Siddiqui, “Neoliberal Globalization, Poverty
Creation and Environmental Degradation in Developing Countries”,
International Journal of Environment and Development
, Vol. 5 (1), 2008,
pp. 1-27.
4
See his trilogy on the American Empire.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 6 [VOL. XXXIX
reported in such a way that non-academics can understand what is
really going on.
When academics in the social sciences, who have the
responsibility to study society and be honest about the degradation
brought about by actually existing neoliberal capitalism, jump on the
ideological bandwagon and advance their careers by advancing the
ruling class ideology, they become guilty of contributing to human
insecurity. When they promote privatization of social security,
pension schemes, medical benefits, under the argument that all will
be better off, then they have the responsibility to show whether it is
actually empirically true. Millions of individuals under neoliberal
privatization schemes saw their pension plans robbed of value by
greedy capitalists across the world in late 2008. When academics taut
the market, as the salvation for society, they greatly increase global
human insecurity. The people are told to trust the market. Yet when
the market fails, Wall Street, stock traders, politicians, bankers, and
all the so-called free marketers rush to be saved by the state.
Academics have an ethical responsibility to tell the truth in the
textbooks. Yet the real function of universities is to reproduce the
ruling class and the ruling ideology. Students are not to learn that the
only way that capitalism can be kept afloat is by being rescued
periodically by the state. They are not to understand that the people
are being robbed over and over. They are robbed when the system
collapses and they lose what little wealth they have built up. They are
robbed a second time when they pay taxes to bail out the bankers
whose greed collapses the enterprises. How long will such a system
be considered to be “just?”
War and Human Insecurity
War has been about what happens to the state, not about what
happens to the people. Who cares about the people? For Robert Fisk,
war is really about what happens to the people, that is, the tragedy of
all wars. “War is primarily not about victory of defeat but about death
and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 7
spirit.”
5 “We created a desert and called it peace.” This from a Celtic
Chieftain about the Romans illustrates the aftermath of war from past
history. The people have always been caught up in armies creating
deserts.
What kind of human security is it when one’s city gets
vaporized with an atomic weapon as with Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
What kind of human security is it when one’s country is drenched
with chemical weapons? One gets fried alive if that chemical is
napalm, which the US used in Korea and Vietnam and again illegally
and secretly in Iraq. What kind of human security is it when mass
graves are created by killing civilians who are suspected of having
communist sympathies, such as is now coming to light in South
Korea? What kind of human security is it when the US sponsored
death squads in El Salvador killed peasants who wanted freedom
from exploitation from landlords and dumped their bodies in ravines?
What kind of human security is it when villagers are bombed and
killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the name of a “war on
terror.” The dead are cynically referred to as “collateral damage”
while foreign forces in their countries claim to be providing
“security.”
The greatest inventor and the greatest user of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in history is a long way from being the late
Saddam Hussein. In fact, WMD represents prestige, power and
national strength in realist state logic. It is highly honorable to be a
warrior and to kill, as noted by Thurstein Veblen.
6 The napalm or
jellied petroleum which the US used massively in Korea and Vietnam
burns off people’s skin. And the US sprayed Vietnam with Agent
Orange, a form of toxic dioxin which is still killing people. The US
used napalm, burning people alive in Fallujah in Iraq, secretly and
against international law. The Balkans and Iraq are now massively
polluted with depleted uranium, which is far from being depleted.
Depletion takes some 4.5 billion years. People will be suffering in
both regions for a long time to come. Yet all of these wars were seen
to come under the category of providing global security.
5
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle
East
, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. xviii.
6
Thurstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Dover
Publication, 1994.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 8 [VOL. XXXIX
Notably, I.F. Stone wrote about the US carpet bombing of
villages in Korea with napalm during the Korean War.
7 He argued
that there was no compelling military reason for using napalm to
destroy people and kill innocent civilians. Many villages were said to
be “enemy occupied” and given “saturation treatment” when it was
thought that there were a few North Koreans in the villages. This is
really little different from the Vietnam War and the US occupation of
Iraq today. It is seen in the destructive Israeli bombing of residential
areas of Lebanon in 2006 and the killing by the Israel Defense Forces
of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the case of Korea, there was “a complete indifference to
non-combatants” in each case, when families were bombed and
vaporized in the villages. They were just collateral damage, which is
a form of dehumanization and objectification of living human
individuals.
Stone cites a dispatch from a New York Times correspondent
about the napalm bombing of a village in North Korea. “A napalm
raid hit the village three or four days ago… and nowhere in the
village have they buried the dead because there is nobody left to do
so… the inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were
caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the
napalm struck- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls
playing in an orphanage.” A captain said: “You can kiss that group of
villages good-bye.” The US Air Force reported “excellent results.”
Villages are still being kissed good-bye in the name of
“national security.” From the military standpoint, it was indeed
excellent. But what kind of human security is that? It is very much
like what the United States said about the ancient city of Hue in
Vietnam. “We had to destroy the city to save it.”
8 Again, this was
said when the US military destroyed the city of Fallujah in 2004 to
kill or drive out members of al-Qaeda. Every city in the whole of
7
I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War l950-51, Boston, Little
Brown, l988, [Originally published by Monthly Review Press in l952].
8
The exact phrase was repeated when the US military attacked and destroyed
the city of Fallujah in Iraq in November 2004 as punishment for the killing
of the four mercenary Blackwater guards a few months before.
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 9
Korea was bombed. The whole country was almost totally destroyed.
The Korean War was officially a “police action” but killed between
three and four million people. The Vietnam War killed another three
million. In Iraq, at least another three million have died, since the first
Gulf War in l991. Now in Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is
upset over the killing of innocent civilians as villages are bombed by
US forces and NATO forces. In August of 2008, some 90 civilians
died in one village, about 60 of them being children. This bombing by
US forces has now spread to Waziristan in Pakistan. In Columbia in
the drug war and in Nicaragua in the Contra War in the l980s, many
innocent civilians were killed. All of this is said to be for “national
security.”
Now in late 2008, American officials continue to say the US
must “win” in Iraq and if they don’t win, the Iraqis will follow them
home! On the other hand, it was not the Iraqis who asked the
Americans to come and occupy their country. Human security is
always under threat. After Iraq, every country hoped that the United
States would choose a country different from their own in which to
“promote democracy.”
Today, the threat is more serious than ever. In a recent book,
Hegemony or Survival
, Noam Chomsky considers whether the human
species will survive. There were certainly grave threats of a nuclear
holocaust during the Cold War. Chomsky cites the biologist Ernst
Myer who notes that in terms of human survival, beetles and bacteria
are vastly more successful in terms of survival than humans. It may
be that humans have used their 100,000 years on earth to destroy
themselves and their time on earth is about to be ended. The average
life of a species is about 100,000 years. This means that in terms of
survival of a species, it is better to be stupid than smart.
Capitalism, Neoliberalism and Human Insecurity
Beyond war and imperialism, there is a very fundamental and
deeper contradiction between neoliberalism, capitalism and human
security. But neoliberal globalization, the contemporary form of
capitalism, hides this reality. And today, the promoters of neoliberal
capitalism are very proud of the achievements of capitalism. Yet in
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 10 [VOL. XXXIX
this system, even capital is not secure, in spite of all the big guns at
its disposal, let alone human security.
Francis Fukuyama thought that the world had reached the “end
of history,” the ultimate human achievement with this sort of
liberalism. “The last man,” the neoliberal rational individual might
actually end up being the last man if history continues on its present
deadly course. Of course, we have not reached the end of history.
There are some simple facts which are either not mentioned or
conveniently forgotten, which give us some indication of the success
of global capitalism over the last half century or so.
Since the end of the developmentalist era in the l950s and
1960s, world economic growth has slowed to about half, from 5
percent annually to some 2.5 percent.
9 Global corporate profits, on
the other hand, had soared until the economic crises in late 2008.
Global inequality has grown by leaps and bounds. This is a major
source of human insecurity. In fact, global inequality is now the
greatest in human history. Between rich and poor countries, the ratio
of standard of living was only about three to one in 1820. It is now
often said that Karl Marx was wrong and is irrelevant, but this is
exactly what he predicted some 150 years ago. The increasing
pauperization is seen around the world today. The richest one percent
of the world’s people receives about the same income as the bottom
57 percent. The richest 50 individuals have more income than the
poorest 416 million. About one percent own some 80 percent of the
world’s wealth. This is called privatization, but it is actually closer to
pirateization, as most of the world’s wealth is actually produced by
the poor.
Today, most of the world’s population cannot live on the
income they receive. At least 40 percent of the global population,
9
The IMF warned of even slower global growth in the wake of the global
financial economic crises in late 2008. The George W. Bush
Administration, which almost everyone in the entire world was waiting
anxiously to see end, still had enough clout to extend its invisible hand and
deal a hard whack to just about everybody in every country around the
globe. There seemed to be no place or no market in which to hide.
Ironically, after so much touting of the free market, the state seemed to be
the only refuge for the Bush-beleaguered of the globe.
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 11
which comes to 2.5 billion people, makes less than two US dollars a
day. Millions live in slums. In India, thousands of farmers have
committed suicide because they could not bear to live on their
miserable existence. On the other end of the scale, in top companies
in the US, company heads make from 1000 to 2000 times as much as
their employees. It seems that they have very large brains, are terribly
creative and always go business class, so they deserve it. It recently
emerged, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Bank, that Richard
Fuld, who headed the company, was compensated by 480 million
dollars over eight years. Americans were outraged by such greed
when they were asked to work and give their tax dollars to bail out
these banks, but the bankers were unrepentant. When AIG Insurance
Company was bailed out by the US Government around the same
time, the executives celebrated with a party costing over 400,000
dollars.
And inequality is getting worse around the world, or better,
depending on whether one is in business class or the other class.
Capitalists say they do not believe in class analysis but seem to in
practice on airplanes and airport lounges, where the class which
controls capital is strictly segregated from the rest of the people in
“business class.” Brains, of course, have nothing to do with it. It is
strictly according to one’s relation to “business,” that is, capital. The
ratio of the top five percent to the bottom five percent was 78 to one
in l988. By l993 it was 114 to one. This has only increased since.
Financial crises, such as the financial crises in late 2008, generally
have the effect of increasing inequality. The wealthiest investors with
cash are salivating over the chance to acquire “distressed assets”
cheaply. They will emerge with greater wealth when the crisis
subsides.
With such a system, the banks also get a chance to rob the
people twice. First they rob them of the money they have put in the
bank. What else could dipping out 480 million dollars by a single
individual on the way to bankrupting the bank honestly be called?
The people are robbed again when they are asked to pay taxes to bail
the banks out from their excesses. The state has to step in to ensure
the continuation of capitalist accumulation when the greed on Wall
Street has killed the capitalist goose. Back in business, the banks
proceed to robbing the public again with a fountain pen by issuing
more loans, with little or nothing to back them up.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 12 [VOL. XXXIX
But is it not true that globalization is closing this income gap
today, as we are told, and as neoclassical economic theory predicts?
The answer, of course, is “no.” According to one source, only 9
countries (4 percent of the world’s population) have reduced the
wealth inequality gap. In the USA, the wealthiest country by some
measures, one person in eight lives in poverty. Of the 100 wealthiest
entities around the globe, only 48 are countries and 52 are big
corporations. This is generally admitted to be morally unacceptable.
Financial Terrorism
Corporate security is a different matter, really. When people
are going bankrupt without jobs and losing their homes, this is a
problem for the market to solve. When corporations are going
bankrupt, it is a different matter. Governments care about corporate
security, as opposed to human security, under the current system of
“socialism” for big corporations and capitalism and the market for the
little people. The system of “socialism for the rich” and the
politicians and capitalism for the masses is firmly in place. When the
banks run out of money, they are said to “cash strapped” and are
refunded with billions from the central banks or taxpayers. The term
‘cash strapped,” of course, is never noted as a condition of the people.
It is measured rather as “a drop in consumer confidence” or “weak
demand.” But large doses of “socialism” are quickly forthcoming for
the banks in the UK and the United States. When things really got
bad, Congress was asked to approve a bailout package of more than
700 billion dollars for the system. Of course, it is not “socialism for
the rich.” It is better described as financial fascism of financial
terrorism, as noted by the critical economist, Max Kaiser.
Corporate profits, of course, are not about to be socialized.
Over the last three years, from 2005 to 2008, corporate profits are up
60 percent while incomes have generally fallen in real terms. The
incomes of most have risen at most by ten percent in nominal terms.
In the economic downturn, tens of thousands are losing their jobs in
practically every country.
Indeed, we cannot deny that the results of actually existing
neoliberal capitalism are very impressive indeed. No other economic
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 13
system in history has produced such results, which include the
following: fully half of all humanity is malnourished; a billion people
live in slums; about half the world’s population live on less than two
US dollars a day; a billion people have no access to clean water; two
billion (one third) have no electricity; two and a half billion have no
sanitary facilities; one half of all children (one billion) suffer greatly
through poverty, war and disease; those made homeless inside Iraq
due to the US imperialist occupation now number 2.7 million; and
there are at least three million who have fled to neighboring
countries. The list could go on and on. The world’s CEO’s have
shown their talents in their contributions to producing such conditions
and surely deserve their inordinately high salaries. But what kind of
human security is this?
More than half the world’s population is being terrorized by
neoliberalism. They had nothing to fear from socialism or
communism during the cold war and have nothing to fear from
Islamic terrorism today. The war on terror for them, if there was
indeed such a thing, would be a war on capitalism and its present
form, neoliberalism. Such words as emanate from the mouth of
western politicians about a war on terror is completely
incomprehensible to at least half of the world’s population. They live
in the extreme of human insecurity provided by the global economic
system.
It may be seen as “national security” or security for capital. To
be fair, capitalism has often produced a high “gross national product,”
a “very gross national product” as Edward Abbey, the American
environmentalist and anarchist, said.
10
Providing “Security” and Historical Decline
Capitalism eventually runs itself into the ground. It happened
once again in late 2008, with the scramble to put the shattered
Humpty Dumpty of trilateral capitalism back on the Wall. The people
were told to stand still and be patient while the bankers fleeced them
of their hard-earned pay for decades into the future. All the focus of
10
Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, Boston, Little Brown, 1994.
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 14 [VOL. XXXIX
the TV cameras was on the fictitious numbers of stock prices on Wall
Street, while little attention was paid to the real economy, which
would drive people to the wall without homes and employment. The
US under illegal pretext had, in the name of providing security,
squandered a trillion dollars on an imperialist war in Iraq enriching
American private corporations with profits to the tune of billions of
dollars. But President George W. Bush was rapidly collapsing the
American Empire.
Meanwhile, however, the countries which are over the hill,
historically, which include the G-7, cannot generate enough jobs for
their own people under capitalism. These are the historical relics, the
old European countries, the now fallen former “Great Powers.” And
increasingly, the US is headed south in more ways than one to join
them on the scrap heap of history. So, they live off the labor of the
rest of the world, and the products other countries produce. The
European Union colonizes more countries in the east of Europe and
the US lives off the labor of China. The US has been reduced to
borrowing some one billion dollars a day to carry on its colonialist
wars for the control of gas and petrol. Today, the former socialists in
China (with a de facto state-guided capitalist economy but named
“market socialism”) save the American capitalists from their folly.
The US never knew how much it needed Chairman Mao until it had
to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the Chinese credit card after
George W. Bush had given all the money in the US treasury to his
rich business friends, including the firms controlled by the Bush
family itself.
This is not true of all countries, to be fair. Some try to change
the system to provide for all, guaranteeing jobs and social welfare.
Namely, they promote genuine human security. But they get in
trouble with Texas. This, of course, is opposite of “reform” as it is
being carried out around the world today, which means shifting social
welfare from the needy in society to big corporations to bolster
capitalist accumulation. This is what they are supposed to be doing,
how they are supposed to be “reforming” the system. Following the
dictates of the IMF, which works as a sort of rapid unemployment
force to be deployed around the world, states tend to impoverish their
own populations. The cost of neoliberalism to the global population,
in loss of jobs and social welfare, in terms of human insecurity, has
not been calculated.
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 15
The sort of real reform which bolsters genuine human security
is not the “market way” of doing things. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
is making reforms to bolster the welfare of the people. This is a real
measure of democracy. And it makes him, instantly, an enemy of the
United States of America, and, to a lesser extent, those imperialists
who trail in their wake, namely the European Union and Japan. When
Chavez holds a referendum, loses and accepts the results, he is called
“authoritarian. In short, his efforts to guarantee human security are
met with extreme hostility from the powers that be. Indeed, the US
organized a coup against him, but it failed because a million people
came into the streets and demanded that he be put back into power.
US policy toward Venezuela is driven not by concern for the people,
but concern for capital and resources, notably oil.
Perhaps it is not fair to criticize poor countries for their lack of
human security. They often do not have the capacity. But when we
look at the rich countries, this may be a better test. There are, in fact,
large differences between the developed countries, between the US
and Europe. In terms of social welfare, the US wins hands down, that
is, in cheating their people out of the social welfare and conditions
which rightly belong to them. They are at the flat bottom in almost
any measure of human welfare among the developed countries.
Moreover, they do not mind their own business but force other
countries to follow in their wrong policies which deprive people of
their democratic rights.
Michael Moore’s recent film, “Sicko” illustrates this well. The
lack of social medicine in the United States is a genuine disgrace. At
least 50 million Americans have no health insurance at all. But even
having full private health insurance does not provide security. Half
the bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills which families
cannot pay. And three-quarters of those claiming bankruptcies due to
health bills have full health coverage, but the insurance companies do
not pay. This deplorable public policy of neglecting public health in
the United States contributed greatly to bringing the entire global
financial system down in late 2008. People could not pay both their
inordinate medical bills and their mortgages at the same time.
The solution to America’s health problem is simple. The
United States does not even have to invent a new system. US
THE TURKISH YEARBOOK 16 [VOL. XXXIX
policymakers could just adopt one of the systems which work well in
Canada, the UK, or France. But this is not going to be done in the US.
Why? Because of the power of capital, the profits of the
pharmaceutical industry and the privatization of the medical
insurance industry. To be sure, many sectors of US business would
actually benefit from a single payer government health insurance
system, but these industries are simply too powerful. The US
government is not independent enough from these industries to bring
such a system into being. So their profits must be preserved. This
means that any reform, such as those proposed by the Presidential
candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, will be inefficient and
continue to reap huge profits from the American people.
If the government is involved in doing something for people’s
health, it is seen as “socialized medicine” and an evil. Bailing out
private banks with billions of taxpayers dollars, of course, is a totally
different thing! In the prevailing neoconservative philosophy, the
government is there to serve the interests of business and capitalist
accumulation and not the people.
If capitalists really trusted the market, why would they send
25,000 lobbyists to Washington to shill for big corporations.
Priorities are business security and national security, and not “human
security.” National security has always been synonymous with
protecting the profits of global corporations. The people must rely on
the “market” but the government is always there to rescue big
business. They expect it, since they have bought it and owned it. This
is sort of a modern neoliberal social contract. But beyond this, today,
what is known as “national security” has bankrupted America and the
people.
The US has some one-thousand military bases around the
world. The national debt is 9.7 trillion dollars and will reach almost
11 trillion dollars by the time George W. Bush leaves the White
House. This is up from five billion when he took office eight years
before. The US is currently spending 15 billion dollars a month on
two wars, giving every family of four a debt of $120,000. At least 90
percent of so-called defense spending goes straight to corporate
profits. As war is privatized, for corporate profits, the country must
stay at permanent war. With the sub-prime mortgage crises, some one
million families in America have lost their homes and another million
2008] HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 17
are in danger of losing them. And when a disaster like Hurricane
Katrina strikes, the US government says it lacks the resources to help.
In fact there is human insecurity almost everywhere with
violence and human misery such as in Darfur. In the end, human
security is part of environmental disaster. Human individuals are a
part of nature. But they, of course, have a very low status compared to
commodities like oil. If the world under the current system of
neoliberal capitalism has so little concern with the human part of
nature, what will be the fate of the rest of nature? Unfortunately, the
priorities lie elsewhere.
Conclusion: The US as the Provider of Global Security?
The truism that America has been the provider of global
security in the world since World War II should be questioned.
Initially, the existence of Communist countries forced the western
countries to provide a degree of social welfare. The Bretton Woods
institutions put limits on the international flow of capital and
exchange rates. Neoliberalism has largely wiped out these redeeming
features which contributed to a degree of human security.
At the same time, the United States was at the head of the
trilateral system of capitalist nations which was determined to roll
back any efforts by emerging nations to establish alternatives to
neoliberal capitalism. Counterinsurgency was used to roll back
people’s democratic revolutions. Today the so-called “war on terror”
is a continuation of these efforts to preserve the hegemony of the
trilateral group of nations. Considering the enterprise of saddling the
globe with neoliberalism and depriving people of social welfare,
under a totalitarian global agenda, it may be more accurate to view
the United States as the primary provider of human insecurity in the
post-war world.
