yalla Grant Smith you need to reconfigure that analysis

NOVANEWS

So the incorrigible and tenaciously ignorant Grant Smith/Idrees Ahmad duo have posted a new video on their website: “US-Israel Trade: Espionage, Theft and Secrets.” Look out! The lobby is stealing our military technology and hard-earned taxpayer dollars, spending it within a foreign state! Nationalists unite! I also saw this video reproduced on the feed of a leftist friend of mine. A couple comments. Nations and economies are socially constructed categories. As is capital. The question is, who do they serve, and what do they explain? Does a conceptualization of “Israel” stealing “American” taxpayer dollars help us forge a coalition to break Zionism, the Special Relationship, empire, and capitalism?

If that were the case, we would be posed with a moral quandary. However, it does not help us forge such a coalition and therefore poses nothing of the sort. Instead, the “$10 billion/year foreign aid program” that Smith is talking about functions exactly as foreign aid programs are supposed to function: American taxpayers pay their taxes. Said taxes go to “aid” which is then re-routed directly back to companies owned by the American ruling class. Americans are duped. American executives are not. The US-Israel trade agreement? I’ll quote myself:

Smith is not unaware of the transnational nature of the ownership structures of nominally Israeli corporations — he provides some evidence of the beginnings of the acquisition of the Israeli high-technology sector by capital from the American high-technology sector. But he should have kept digging. We also know other things: that the bulk of growth in Israeli-American “trade” since 1996 has been in the high-technology sector, and that American capital is aggressively invested in “Israeli” high-technology firms. Academics Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler calculate that the correlation coefficient between the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and the NASDAQ was .7 in the five-year span from 1996 to 2001 — meaning 70 percent of variations in the TASE are “explained” by variations in the NASDAQ — as “trade” deficits begin to mount.

From 2002 to 2007, a nearly synchronous 92 percent of variations in the TASE were explained by movements in the NASDAQ, as amidst a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, “Israeli” firms became decreasingly Israeli except by physical place of production. Furthermore, Israeli state subsidies to high-technology firms, as well as state-sponsored investments in human capital and infrastructure, are astronomically high. Israel is a very nice place for many American companies to invest. Smith misses an opportunity to discuss and explain the implications of this tightly-wrought economic relationship, not least of which is that the trade deficit is mostly a statistical artifact.

Smith starts from the assumption that nationalism explains something here. It does not, except insofar as Jewish nationalism in Israel allows for a perpetual warfare state with high levels of public support for R&D and educational infrastructure, paid out of funds squeezed out of Israeli taxpayers fearing the Arab menace hovering menacingly at their door. Thus scared, they create the infrastructure that ensures that American-based capital (the Lobby) can get super-profits and manufacture goods that it then exports back to the US. The “trade” deficit, in this as in other cases — China, for example — is mostly a statistical artifact, with the possible exception of Israeli-manufactured pharmaceuticals, a case that deserves deeper attention. As always, the class war is on.

They own almost everything and do not care much which country the goodies are manufactured in. As it happens, I met a Pakistani fellow after the Karl Rove talk tonight who told me that he didn’t consider himself Pakistani. He considered himself American, aspiring to the upper-class, which simply does not care so much about ethnic background except insofar as it helps it pull the wool over the eyes of the rubes and create ideological hegemony for their policies of militaristic class-war. Why do these vocal but marginal elements insist on playing this fool’s game of trying to trick capitalism into jingoistic nationalism, meanwhile urging us to make a deal with the devil? Last time we tried autarky, it did not work out so well. Tragically, the Palestinians were the last victims. Do you want to play this game again?

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