After School Arms Club
February 10, 2008
For a country as obsessed with ‘security’ as Britain, surely there must be stringent rules regulating the sale of arms. Not quiet, as Mark Thomas finds out by getting a small band of Schoolchildren to exploit loopholes in Britain’s arms controls by importing torture equipment from China and selling tanks to Africa.
Commanding Heights
February 4, 2008
The Battle for the World Economy
Here is an excellent three part series from PBS that presents a rather celebratory but interesting account of globalization.
1. The Battle of Ideas
A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.
Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.
Jottings on the Conjuncture
January 31, 2008
Recently when I met Tariq Ali in London, he suggested I read Perry Anderson’s editorial in the current issue of the New Left Review. I had forgotten about the matter until I noticed this attack on the New Left icon by a member of the UK Israel Lobby on the Guardian‘s blog (abiding recent convention the fellow generously concedes Anderson is not an ‘antisemite’, following it immediately with the ubiquitous ‘but’). The piece must have really hit its mark if the Britcons have had to let loose their poodles of war. I was compelled to read, and I must say, I am thoroughly impressed. The analysis here is nuanced and sophisticated and well worth the read.
The contemporary period—datable at one level from the economic and political shifts in the West at the turn of the eighties; at another from the collapse of the Soviet bloc a decade later—continues to see deep structural changes in the world economy and in international affairs. Just what these have been, and what their outcomes are likely to be, remains in dispute. Attempts to read them through the prism of current events are inherently fallible. A more conjunctural tack, confining itself to the political scene since 2000, involves fewer hazards; even so, simplifications and short-cuts are scarcely to be avoided. Certainly, the notations below do not escape them. Jottings more than theses, they stand to be altered or crossed out.
i. the house of harmony
The Myth of Free Trade
January 25, 2008
Chalmers Johnson on the Myth of Free Trade.
Ha-Joon Chang is a Cambridge economist who specializes in the abject poverty of the Third World and its people, groups, nations, and empires, and their doctrines that are responsible for this condition. He won the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for his book “Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective” (2002), and he shared the 2005 Wassily Leontief Prize for his contributions to “Rethinking Development in the 21st Century.” The title of his 2002 book comes from the German political economist Friedrich List, who in 1841 criticized Britain for preaching free trade to other countries while having achieved its own economic supremacy through high tariffs and extensive subsidies. He accused the British of “kicking away the ladder” that they had climbed to reach the world’s top economic position. Chang’s other, more technical books include “The Political Economy of Industrial Policy” (1994) and “Reclaiming Development: An Economic Policy Handbook for Activists and Policymakers” (2004).
Guns, Germs and Steel
January 10, 2008
Hold the Ham N’ Eggs
December 3, 2007
Globalization and terror. The two often go hand in hand. Here my friend toni solo looks at Euro-American efforts to derail the possibility of an emerging alternative.
Efforts by the Bush regime to destabilize and overthrow governments resisting corporate globalization in Latin America, and everywhere else too, will persist whoever wins the next US Presidential election — assuming no attack is launched on Iran and the election does in fact take place. The monolithic plutocracy that runs the United States is supported in those destabilization efforts by the governments of their European and Pacific allies. Analysing a list of the world’s top corporations, leaders in their respective industries, explains why this should be so.(1).
One finds that companies from the United States and its European and Pacific allies account for well over 80% of the total. One can also note that the Latin American, African and Asian corporations in the list are all State owned companies, with the exception of China Mobile and Brazil’s CVRD mining company (privatized from 1997 onwards). The consolidation of monopoly corporate capitalism over the last decade through mergers and acquisitions is certain to continue. So the only chance for less developed countries to defend the rights and needs of their impoverished majorities against the ravages of monster multinational companies is to integrate and to invest in their future together.
Financial hypocrisy
November 26, 2007
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out that the “contrast between the IMF/US Treasury’s advice during the East Asia crisis and what has happened in the sub-prime debacle is glaring”. Stiglitz’s insider’s view not only confirms Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism thesis, it also provides rare insights into the whole cynical enterprise of the multilateral financial institutions.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the East Asia crisis, which began in Thailand on July 2, 1997, and spread to Indonesia in October and to Korea in December. Eventually, it became a global financial crisis, embroiling Russia and Latin American countries, such as Brazil, and unleashing forces that played out over the ensuing years: Argentina in 2001 may be counted as among its victims.
There were many other innocent victims, including countries that had not even engaged in the international capital flows that were at the root of the crisis. Indeed, Laos was among the worst-affected countries. Though every crisis eventually ends, no one knew at the time how broad, deep, and long the ensuing recessions and depressions would be. It was the worst global crisis since the Great Depression.
King of Spain mutant US President
November 20, 2007
Today’s guest editorial is a superb, ranging analysis of the decline of the imperial ancien regimes and their global challengers from my friend toni solo.
One can read too much into the unprecedented rude behaviour and abrupt departure of Juan Carlos, Bourbon King of Spain, during the recent Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. Clearly, when he got up and left in the middle of Daniel Ortega’s lucid analysis of international relations, after first telling Hugo Chavez to shut his mouth, he was simply leaving in order to shape-shift discreetly back into George W. Bush. What else explains the astonishing fall of the United States and its European and Pacific allies into ancien regime corrupt decay and relative decline? The President of the United States is the Bourbon King of Spain. Obvious, once you think about it really ….
Ancien regime leaders like President Bush, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union NATO ventriloquist-dummy Javier Solana have now bumped up hard against the limits of their imperialist regime’s economic power and environmental sustainability. Their overwhelming economic dominance no longer goes unchallenged. Their countries’ own natural resources are almost exhausted. Like any other empire in decline they are more than ready to use military power to hold on to what they want.
Amerika
November 15, 2007
“Coca Cola, WonderBra”! Rammstein on Cocacolonization.
Creative Destruction
September 22, 2007
Alexander Cockburn on Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.
Leftists used to think that at least as a general axiom, if not by a precise deadline, capitalism was doomed. When I first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, there was enough exuberance in the air even for mild-mannered reformers to be pushing plans for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, World Bank and kindred institutions.
But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob copious documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet serves to amplify this pervasive funk into a catastrophist mindset. It imbues most of the English-speaking left west of the Atlantic after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.“
