As the “leader of the free (trade) world,” Bush occasionally makes trips abroad, visiting far-flung outposts of the neoliberal empire, most recently Mongolia, a small land-locked nation of debatable significance, except for the fact it is a textbook case in globalism. It also helps that Mongolia is strategically placed in regard to China.

“I have come to tell you: As you build a free society in the heart of central Asia, the American people stand with you,” Bush said while visiting Ulan Bator’s Government House, reports George E. Condon Jr. of the Copley News Service. “You are an example of success for this region and the world. I know the transition to liberty has not always been easy and Americans admire your patience and determination.”

It is an understatement to declare Mongolia’s “transition to liberty” (that is, liberty for neolib loan sharks and carpetbaggers) “has not always been easy,” especially for its the people.

In 1996, “market reformers” and “democrats” won the elections in Mongolia and wasted little time selling the country out to the neolibs. “They called in the IMF and as a result the standard of living and security of Mongolian families has plummeted,” the Guardian reported on July 12, 2000. “The ‘democratic’ government imposed IMF demanded austerity measures and many of Mongolia’s 2.4 million people were plunged into poverty.”

In 1995, the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank forced Mongolia to “liberalize” (as in neoliberalize) its cashmere industry. As a result, Mongolia’s wool processing industry was devastated by Chinese competition. “The shock therapy proposed by these agencies has actually facilitated Chinese leverage over the Mongolian economy. They supported privatization of state assets, minimal government, elimination of state subsidies and price liberalization, and the reduction, if not abolition, of tariffs on imported products and taxes on exports. Cheap Chinese consumer goods have poured into Mongolia, and the Chinese have had access to Mongolia’s raw materials and mineral wealth,” Morris Rossabi of Jamestown Foundation noted earlier this year.

“The country began the shift to market economy in the early nineties, and received a ’shock treatment’ by the IMF. The agricultural productivity has dramatically declined since then due to removal of state support and the privatization of state farms, equipment and land,” explains the People’s Caravan 2004 for Food Sovereignty. “As a result of this, Mongolia is one of the most food insecure countries in Asia with 80% of its national food consumption being imported from China, Russia and other countries. The greatest impact is being felt by herders and farmers whose livelihood depends on small-scale dairy production, animal husbandry and agriculture.”

“Mongolians are realizing that magic words like ‘privatization’ don’t bring a better quality of life automatically”, the leader of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party told the Guardian.

“People are dying of hunger and youngsters are turning to crime.” said herder Chimeddorj.

“Meanwhile a Western diplomat fearful at this setback to their plans [a socialist government was elected] for a capitalist future for Mongolia said: ‘We’ll have to watch very carefully for any retrograde movement on basic freedoms.’ He means freedom for capital not freedom to have an education or health services for the people,” concluded the Guardian.

Of course, the hunger and crime suffered by the Mongolian people translates into profits for the neolib banks and multinational corporations, many of them based in the labor gulag of China.

As Pierre Bourdieu explains, this neoliberal “utopia” results in the “imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of [a] sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behavior” and engenders an “extraordinary mass of suffering.”

Thus the current standard bearer of “mass suffering” imposed everywhere, George Bush, deems it necessary—or his handlers deem it necessary, since Bush decides nothing and is mentally and spiritually incapable of deciding anything—to visit neoliberal outposts of “fledgling democracy,” fresh from talks “with Chinese officials on trade, regional security, human rights and big-power diplomacy,” in other words a convocation of globalists determined to exploit the helpless people of Mongolia and other victims of the “moral Darwinism” currently in the process of destroying the planet.