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January
3, 2002
Shahid
Alam
Is
There an Islamic Problem?
January
2, 2002
Ross Regnart
Patriot
Act Redefines the Mob as "Terrorist Associates"
John Chuckman
The
Republicans' Secret Plan X
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
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Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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The
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January
3, 2002
America's Empire Rules
an Unbalanced World
By Robert Hunter Wade
Suppose you are a modern-day Roman emperor, the
leader of the most powerful country in a world of sovereign states
and international markets. What sort of framework of international
political economy arrangements do you create so that without
having to throw your weight around more than occasionally, normal
market forces bolster the economic preeminence of your country,
allow your citizens to consume far more than they themselves
produce, and keep challengers down?
You want autonomy to decide on your exchange
rate and monetary policy in response only to your own national
objectives, while having other countries depend on your support
in managing their own economies. You want to be able to engineer
volatility and economic crises in the rest of the world in order
to hinder the growth of centers that might challenge your preeminence
and in order to allow your vulture funds periodically to buy
up their assets at fire-sale prices. You want intense competition
between exporters in the rest of the world that gives you an
inflow of imports at constantly decreasing prices relative to
the price of your exports.
You want to invite the best brains in
the rest of the world to come to your universities, companies
and research institutes. You befriend the middle classes elsewhere
and make sure they have good material reasons for supporting
the framework. You make it unlikely that elites and masses should
ever unite in nativistic reactions to your dominance or demand
"nationalistic" development policies that nurture competitors
to your industries.
What features do you hard-wire into the
international political economy? First, free capital mobility.
Second, free trade (excepting imports that threaten domestic
industries important for your re-selection). Third, international
investment free from any discriminatory favoring of national
companies through protection, public procurement, public ownership
or other devices, with special emphasis on the freedom of your
companies to get the custom of national elites for the management
of their financial assets, their private education, health care,
pensions, and the like.
Fourth, your currency as the main reserve
currency. Fifth, no constraint on your ability to create your
currency at will (such as a dollar-gold link), so that you can
finance unlimited trade deficits with the rest of the world.
Sixth, international lending at variable interest rates denominated
in your currency, which means that borrowing countries in crisis
have to repay you more when their capacity to repay is less.
This combination allows your people to
consume far more than they produce; it periodically produces
financial instability and crises in the rest of the world, which
hold back the crisis-affected countries and also cause other
governments to hold more of your currency and therefore help
to finance your deficits; and it allows your firms and your capital
to enter and exit other markets quickly. You also need, of course,
a bail-out mechanism that protects your creditors and displaces
any losses from periodic panics onto the citizens of the borrowing
country.
To supervise the international framework
you want international organizations that look like cooperatives
of member states and carry the legitimacy of multilateralism,
but are financed in a way that allows you to control them.
A Machiavellian interpretation of the
U.S. role in the world economy since the end of the Bretton Woods
regime around 1970? Certainly. In reality, America's engineering
of its dominance has at times been for the general good, when
it used its clout to "think for the world." But often
its clout has been used solely in the interests of its richest
citizens and most powerful corporations. This latter tendency
has been dominant lately.
We see it in its new single-minded unilateralism
in international relations, much exacerbated by the mixture of
rage at Sept. 11th and gung-ho jubilation at "success"
in Afghanistan. And we see it in what the United States is now
ramming through the international supervisory organizations.
The United States has engineered the
World Trade Organization to commit itself to negotiate a General
Agreement on Trade in Services, which will facilitate a global
market in private health care, welfare, pensions, education and
water, supplied - naturally - by U.S. companies, and which will
undermine political support for universal access to social services
in developing countries.
And it has engineered the World Bank,
through congressional conditions on the replenishment of IDA,
the soft-loan facility, to launch its biggest refocusing in a
decade - a "private sector development" agenda devoted
to the same end of accelerating the private (and nongovernmental)
provision of basic services on a commercial basis. The World
Bank has made no evaluation of its earlier efforts to support
private participation in social sectors. Its new private sector
development thrust, especially in the social sectors, owes everything
to intense U.S. pressure.
These power relations and exercises of
statecraft are obscured in the current talk about globalization.
Far from being just a collapsing of distance and widening of
opportunities for all, the increasing mobility of information,
finance, goods and services frees the American government of
constraints while more tightly constraining everyone else. Globalization
and the global supervisory organizations enable the United States
to harness the rest of the world to its own rhythms and structure.
Of course these arrangements do not produce
terrorism in any direct way. But they are deeply implicated in
the very slow economic growth in most of the developing world
since 1980, and in the wide and widening world income inequality.
(The average purchasing power of the bottom 10 percent of Americans
is higher than that of two-thirds of the rest of the world's
population.)
Slow economic growth and vast income
disparities, when seen as such, breed cohorts of partly educated
young people who grow up in anger and despair. Some try by legal
or illegal means to migrate to the West; some join militant ethnic
or religious movements directed at each other and their own rulers.
But now the idea has spread among a few vengeful fundamentalists
that the United States should be attacked directly.
The United States and its allies can
stamp out specific groups by force and bribery. But in the longer
run, the structural arrangements that replicate a grossly unequal
world have to be redesigned, as we did at the Bretton Woods conference
after World War II, so that markets working within the new framework
produce more equitable results. Historians looking back a century
from now will say that the time to have begun was now.
Robert Hunter Wade is a professor of political economy at the London
School of Economics and author of Governing
the Market.
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