Re: Global Financial Crisis II
"One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the fame,
And Nicolai Ivanovich
Chossudovsky is his name!
(Hey!)"
(First one to trace this gets a free drink at my
expense at the AEA meetings.)
Sawicky parody on Tom Lehrer, parody on Danny Kaye/Sylivia Fine
("Stanislavsky").
Mind you, despite all this, Michel Chossudovsky has written some
outstanding analyses - I can think of a couple on Africa and
Yugoslavia. So I'm not conceding that Choss is a Lobachevsky
by any means (unless it was the real Lobachevsky).
Just Email the drink thanks.
Bill
==
Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200
202-775-8810 (voice) 1660 L Street, NW
202-775-0819 (fax) Washington, DC 20036
Opinions here do not necessarily represent the
views of anyone associated with the Economic
Policy Institute.
===
Re: Global Financial Crisis II
Rosenberg, Bill wrote: Mind you, despite all this, Michel Chossudovsky has written some outstanding analyses - I can think of a couple on Africa and Yugoslavia. So I'm not conceding that Choss is a Lobachevsky by any means (unless it was the real Lobachevsky). Hear hear. In a land of 30% (official) unemployment, like SA, Michel's rap has gone down very well. If any of you connect into the Third World Network publications out of Penang, you'll know that Michel is usually right at the scene of some financial crime, doing a powerful, well-balanced critique. We had him out to a Johannesburg seminar of the Campaign Against Neoliberalism in SA in February and he packed the house, telling gory structural adjustment tales of his recent travels in Rwanda and Mozambique. The Rwanda information he acquired about the role of the World Bank in financing the import of the tools of genocide through quick-disbursing loans is explosive. His linkage of socio-economic deprivation and political upheaval is usually very well grounded. When you spend time in places like Rwanda and Mozambique where a million people get offed, and you're practically the only one doing analysis of financial power relations and economic contradictions, maybe that generates an apocalyptic tendency. Maybe it should. Just north of here, in Harare, last week saw the Zimbabwe currency drop an astonishing 40% against the US dollar in a matter of *hours* (before a central bank rescue). It's a violently turbulent financial world, seen from the semi-periphery, and it particularly plays havoc with social policy advocacy. The socio-political fallout of some yuppie NY banker's flick of a finger on the keyboard can be terrifying. In SA, a 25% currency crash during a six-week period in 1996 compelled the ANC leadership to formally junk its soc-dem development programme and replace it with a (disfunctional) homegrown SAP, purely for the benefit of the f*ing bond traders, and the ongoing fiscal squeeze is brutal, demonstrably killing ANC constituents. By the way, aside from Michel, we did ask one notable leftist financial commentator from the upper west side of NY out to Johannesburg last year. But though the funds were in place and ticket ready, we got a last-minute cancellation. Which is why some of the reticence, on the part of US comrades, to consider the limits of crisis management -- whereby your markets' solutions to financial bubbles and overproduction effectively means displacement of devaluation to most of the rest of us in the South -- is a slightly irritating characteristic of otherwise crucial information and debate on Pen-L. Not only because it's so US-centric, which it is, but because while everyone and everything else is thinking and acting globally, the concession that capitalism is in ok shape is basically parochial laziness. I'm saying this, of course, with a ;-) because it is the kind of challenge that I posed to Doug Henwood last month at the Brecht Forum and he did, I recall, say he'd do his best to come and check out a different reality as soon as we can next arrange it. Same invitation stands for the rest of you Chossudovsky-critics!
Re: apocalypse
On Sat, 29 Nov 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: Speaking of apocalypse, there's actually an apocalypse index on the web, at http://www.novia.net/~todd/rap2.html [] and the slide in gold prices (perhaps God's way of telling us of the fleetingness of earthly riches). If Calcutta and the pyro-defoliation of Indonesia aren't enough, then God has a strategy problem. valis
Let Us Now Praise Chossudovsky
For whatever it's worth, lest I be embroiled in an endless intra-Slavic vendetta, let interested parties (if any) please note that in my original post I thought the professor's article sufficiently interesting and substantive to merit a reaction, albeit with some criticisms and questions. If I was given to criticism for its own sake, I could spend all day replying to messages of folks whose names need not be mentioned. Second, the Lobachevsky joke was intended in no way as any sort of aspersion as to the originality of Professor C.'s article or any other work. Max Sawicky == Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200 202-775-8810 (voice) 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-0819 (fax) Washington, DC 20036 Opinions here do not necessarily represent the views of anyone associated with the Economic Policy Institute. ===
Chossudovsky Award
First prize for citing Tom Lehrer first goes to E. Dannin. Honorable mention to Prof Rosenberg for tracing the reference one layer back, and also because I'm not certain, given his extra-hemispheric location, whether he was first or not. BTW Bill, Maxine said hello back. Her talk was well received, though ten minutes before its close the long hand of neo-liberalism conspired to empty our building with a false-alarm fire drill. MBS == Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200 202-775-8810 (voice) 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-0819 (fax) Washington, DC 20036 Opinions here do not necessarily represent the views of anyone associated with the Economic Policy Institute. ===
Re: apocalypse
Tom Walker wrote: A couple of questions: Is this out of 167 out of a possible 666? Unfortunately this is one instance where real life falls short of poetic truth. There are 45 categories, rated from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum), so the index's max possible score is 225. What do they call the units? Lucifers? Again, the mundane wins. Points, I'm afraid. Doug
Re: apocalypse
Tom Walker wrote: I think this is where Blake and Goethe meet Marx and Paine, in the restless reworking of myth. The reworking of myth can never cease, when it does it reverts to mythologizing: stale, suffocating, Stalin, Thatcher . . . the myth that "there is no alternative" -- the bogus claim that the myth "to which there is no alternative" is therefore not a myth. There's myth and there's myth. While I absolutely undertand and sympathize with Marx's critique of utopianism, I also think that the loss of any dream of utopia has had terrible effects on real politics - we just can't imagine anything fundamentally different from what exists now. So the construction of some imaginary utopia is a nourishing kind of mythmaking, as long as we realize the constructedness of the myth, and the complexities of making even part of it real. What bothers me about myth, though, is the capacity for self-deception - and what bothered me about the Cho piece was that it trafficked in the fantasy so common to a lot of left writing over the years: that this appalling system will undo itself. It may, but it's more likely it won't. So when I say, as Patrick Bond put it, that capitalism is doing OK, I mean that there's no sign that anything's going to come crashing down - not until enough people tire of the damn thing and knock it over. The unnarativizable other of the apocalypse/normalcy binary may be that awfulness can persist indefinitly; of course, now I've narrated it, and I'm repeating myself anyway, so I'll shut up. Doug
students on strike all over Germany (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 11:54:50 -0800 From: Andreas Hippin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: students on strike all over Germany There is a big strike going on at German universities and Duisburg University where I am studying has joined in as well. There are national aims such as financial support from the state for students to enable them to study without being forced to do jobbing most of the time , more money for the universities for better education, more democracy within the universities, e.g. there is a legitimate students' parliament in Northrhine-Westphalia, the federal state of Germany Duisburg is situated in. But there are no such public bodies in Bavaria or Baden-Wuerttemberg, so students there have no means to articulate their interests. There are also local aims which are even more important since students would like to discuss how they want to be teached, what they want to learn and how they would like to do research. There has been a large meeting of more than 1.000 students which decided to bring the strike to Duisburg last week and it has been confirmed once more in another large meeting on Friday. One of the problems here is that many professors are neither willing nor able to offer high-quality teaching since they're busy with research for private corporations most of the time. They don't even consider it necessary to update their stats. e.g. "This is a table with data published in 1991, but...errrh...there hasn't been much change anyway." That's why one of the demands of the students of economics on strike is to end "lifelong employment" for professors. The media are portraying the strike as a single point movement directed at getting more funds for the universities. As a student participating in the strike I'd like to tell you that there's much more in it. Why should I gon on strike for the goals of my professors or the university? Actually I don't think Duisburg is really crowded and the funds available are allocated the wrong way, e.g. there is a library of the East Asia institute but it is only opened one hour a week although a Japanese librarian has been employed for it. Most students are really fed up with these problems which occur in almost every faculty here. Unfortunately most of them don't think they can achieve anything by protesting against these deficits. After fifteen years of conservative rulership over Germany their generation lacks the experience that the future is wide open and everything can be achieved if you stand together. So the strike will probably be not very successful as far as concrete goals are concerned. However it's another chance to see who's who. Actually I haven't seen to many students of East Asian area sciences out there. But they aren't famous for solidarity anyway. On Monday 13.00 hours there will be a demonstration to the bridges over the river Rhine where Duisburg's steel workers demonstrated ten years ago against the closure of one of the largest steelworks: Krupp Rheinhausen. The bridge was blocked by the workers and their struggle has been a big issue even on national level. The students would like to express their solidarity with the struggles of other declassed groups in this society since they know that there won't be a shachoo seat for everyone although some still seem to believe that they'll be boss someday. Those are living as if they had achieved their goal already, another case of virtual reality. Andreas
Re: apocalypse
One of my students dates the beginning of the U.S. decline to Roe vs. Wade. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: apocalypse
Doug Henwood wrote, There's myth and there's myth. While I absolutely undertand and sympathize with Marx's critique of utopianism, I also think that the loss of any dream of utopia has had terrible effects on real politics - we just can't imagine anything fundamentally different from what exists now. Lenin's poetically *unmarxist* moment in What is to be Done? where he starts to write "We must dream . . . " then interrupts himself in amazement at what he has just written and finally affirms that, yes, we *must* dream . . . What bothers me about myth, though, is the capacity for self-deception - and what bothered me about the Cho piece was that it trafficked in the fantasy so common to a lot of left writing over the years: that this appalling system will undo itself. And soon after that geese will roast themselves and fly onto plates with knives and forks sticking out of their backs. there's no sign that anything's going to come crashing down - not until enough people tire of the damn thing and knock it over. The problem with apocalypses or, for that matter, with utopias isn't simply that the plots are hokey. The problem is that there aren't interesting characters in them (because of the automatism of the plot). This is not to say that the authors of utopias/apocalypse might not sometimes themselves be interesting characters. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
The next Vietnam: virtually real?
I'm surprised at how silently the Digital Diploma Mill piece sailed through here. David F. Noble, author of several books on technology and society, and a galvanizing trip to listen to, deserves more attention than he got. The big question I came away with: Is this it, are the money folks finally playing with fire in this pathetically divided society? With the number of revoltingly painted-over buses in Milwaukee increasing each month, I had already asked myself how soon the students riding these vehicular billboards would experience the move from gross commodification to intimate immiseration. The answer has arrived, on their campuses, in their study plans, behind their monitor screens. This cyber-war will mobilize the schools without splitting families or destroying friendships, and without frying foreigners in napalm. We should be both grateful and eager. valis If we permit Memorial Day to come to us every day, we ignore the concept of sacrifice and dilute its purpose. When we do that we incur the responsibility to effect change. If we are successful, the sacrifice has renewed meaning. It seems there is no alternative to life. But there may be to war... -- from The Wall Within - Steve Mason
Poisoned Lands, part two
November 29, 1997 POISONED LANDS Second of two articles By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF PENYENGAT RENDAH, Indonesia -- Ramli lay on the plank floor of his shack, coughing and breathless, fighting for air like a beached fish. Ramli, a 37-year-old sawmill worker, died like that in this riverside village on the island of Sumatra, leaving no savings and no legacy other than the uncomprehending tears on the unscrubbed faces of his three little daughters -- and the mound in his widow's abdomen that signifies another baby is on its way. Yet as Ramli's widow and children sat grieving inside their shack, wondering how they would survive, the girls coughing themselves, they had no idea what killed him. What about the smoke? "Oh, yeah, that might have been it," agreed Dariah, his 27-year-old widow, who like many Indonesians has just one name, and she looked for a moment out the open door of the shack. The smoke from forest fires was everywhere, an unimaginable cloud that stings the eyes and tightens the chest, like the plume from a campfire -- except that it has blotted out the sun across hundreds of thousands of square miles in Southeast Asia and left the region with the ambiance of an ashtray. The smoke is a striking example of the public obliviousness in Asia to the health risks of the growing environmental disaster throughout the region, an obliviousness so profound that wives discount even the pollution that transforms them into widows. More fundamentally, the smoke has affected a half-dozen countries and demonstrates how, partly because of this obliviousness, Asia's filth is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. Asian polluters are not merely sullying their own countries but are creating environmental catastrophes that cross international boundaries and create a burden for the entire planet. If the traditional paradigm of a pollution problem was a factory that dumped mercury in a lake, harming its immediate neighbors, the environmental headaches of the future increasingly will be regional and global challenges like global warming or acid rain. Asia will have to play a crucial role in the resolution of these problems, the most vexing of which is perhaps global warming, the topic of the international conference in Kyoto, Japan, that begins Dec. 1. Asia now is the source for only 17 percent of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that are suspected of causing global warming, but its carbon dioxide emissions are rising at four times the world average. Just in the last few months, by one calculation, Indonesia's forest fires have released as much greenhouse gas as all the cars and power plants throughout Europe will emit this entire year. Fundamentally, Asia is so huge, is industrializing so quickly and is so dependent on coal and oil -- prime sources of carbon emissions -- that its share of greenhouse-gas emissions is almost certain to overtake that of the West. The Asian Development Bank calculates that by the year 2020, the emissions will increase two to five times, depending in part on whether curbs are instituted. The Smoke: Students Can't See the Blackboard The forest fires of Indonesia demonstrate the difficulty of grappling with transborder pollution. Malaysia and Singapore were particularly hard-hit, and their relatively well-educated populations were more aware of the dangers of breathing the smoke. But they were in effect the hostages of Indonesians who saw the problems as an inconvenience rather than a health crisis. At a junior high school in the city of Jambi on Sumatra, a few hundred students in tan uniforms swarmed about the open square in the middle of the school, none wearing face masks. Some played tag -- an ideal game, because the blanket of smoke made it easy to hide -- and teachers dismissed the haze as nothing more than a bother. "We have no health problems and no drop-off in attendance," Ratnajuwita, the matronly principal of a private school in the Sumatran city of Jambi, said as she sat on a couch in her office. "Everyone is fine. The only problem is that we can't use the blackboards in the classrooms." Why? "The smoke is so thick in the classrooms that students can't see what is written," Ratnajuwita explained patiently. Then she smiled reassuringly and added, "But there are no health problems." Officials at the government hospital in Jambi largely echo that line, describing the smoke as more of a nuisance than a hazard. But that may reflect government policy more than medical fact, for in other countries periods of severe haze have been associated with sharp increases in short-term death rates, as well as long-term increases that are harder to measure. Twenty miles from Jambi, in the riverside village of Kumpeh -- a cluster of wooden houses on stilts, inaccessible except by footpath -- the local farmers have not been informed of the official line. They say that many of the 1,496 people in the village are sick, and they add that three have died after
Poisoned Lands, part one
November 28, 1997 POISONED LANDS First of two articles Across Asia, a Pollution Disaster Hovers By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF BADUI, China -- This little village is hauntingly beautiful, a patchwork of mud-brick shacks framed by the vastness of the Yellow River on one side and rugged gray mountains on the other. But as peasants shuffle along the ocher paths, their eyes following their children and aching at the sight, the hamlet suddenly seems chilly, frightening and grotesque. One-third of the peasants in this hamlet in Gansu Province in western China are mentally retarded or seriously ill. Most people die in middle age, the women report unending miscarriages and stillbirths, many of the children are trapped in toddler-size bodies that they never grow out of, and even the goats totter and stagger into trees as they go blind and insane. In the entrance to one house stood a boy named Wei Haiyun, only 29 inches tall -- the height that an average American baby boy reaches at 12 months, but Haiyun is 8 years old. Haiyun, who is mentally retarded as well, casually urinated on the floor and then played with his fingers in the puddle, as his mother watched and bit her lip and admitted that the only word he ever utters is "Ma." The peasants believe that the horrors of Badui village are the result of polluted water discharged by the state-run Liujiaxia Fertilizer Factory next door. The factory, which sometimes denies the accusations and mostly ignores them, dumps its wastes into the Yellow River just upstream from where the villagers draw their drinking water. The pain here in Badui is emblematic of the growing environmental catastrophe all across Asia. The cost of Asia's "economic miracle" is a rising tide of pollution that is proving a burden not just for Asia but for the entire earth. Already, Asia has what many experts consider the dirtiest water in the world, the filthiest air, the most worrisome overfishing, and the fastest-disappearing coral reefs. One study by the United Nations suggested that 13 of the 15 cities with the worst air pollution in the world are in Asia. "The worst pollution in the world is unequivocally in Asia," said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and co-author of a new book on Asia-Pacific environmental issues. "The statistics about China are stunning, and right behind those Chinese cities stand almost every other major city of Asia: Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta are all right up there among the top polluted cities of the world." When delegates from the United States and more than 150 other countries gather in Kyoto, Japan, beginning Dec. 1 for a conference on global warming, one of the fundamental underlying challenges will be how to accommodate the economic rise of Asia. Aside from the United States, China is already the biggest source of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and -- perhaps more worrying for the long run -- the two fastest-growing sources of these emissions are China and India. More than 1.56 million Asians die each year from the effects of air pollution alone, not counting 500,000 more who die each year from dirty water and bad sanitation, according to estimates published recently by the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Another new study, also from the World Bank but using different assumptions, calculates that 2.03 million people die annually in China alone from the effects of water and air pollution. All these figures represent statistical stabs in the dark, so all the numbers in this article may well be incorrect. But whatever the precise figures, it appears that considerably more people die each year from pollution in Asia than died in the Indochina wars centered on Vietnam (about 1.4 million, from the 1950s through the 1970s). Industrialization vastly magnifies the impact that humans have on nature, and so for the last two centuries it has been the transformation of America and Europe that has had the most dramatic consequences for the planet Earth. But many experts believe that in the coming decades, it is the industrialization of Asia that will pose fundamental new stresses for the ecosystem. Not only does Asia have 60 percent of the world's population, 12 times as much as North America's, but Asia's industrialization is also taking place at triple the pace of the industrial revolution in the West. "Asia's potential effects on global warming are certainly going to be much larger than in the past, and its potential effects on other aspects of the environment, and particularly its own environment, are likely to be greater as well," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development and co-author of a major study on Asia's development. "And what that really means is that Asia has got to be a lot smarter than it has been in environmental management." THE AIR: Two Bangkok Girls Gasp for Breath The paradox is that Asians are not fleeing
Re: Global Financial Crisis II
Doug Henwood: What does it mean to say that capitalism is in "ok shape"? It means that a polarizing system of exploitation is reproducing itself pretty successfully. The creation of poverty alongside of wealth is an ancient feature of this charming economic form. I didn't think I had to make that point with every post to PEN-L, but apparently I do. From the late 1800s until now, the appearance of wealth is very much related the presence of poverty across international boundaries, which makes the system a lot different than the one that Marx wrote about in Capital. For example, Nigeria generates $10 billion in revenue yearly for Shell and Chevron, but Nigeria is the 19th poorest nation in the world just above Mali. The problem is that for all of the pain of the Ogoni people or the indigenous peoples in Ecuador or Papua New Guinea, there is no gain. Standard Oil might have brutalized oilworkers and ruined small farmers in the process of building an oil empire in Oklahoma, but there was capital accumulation. I have just read the first three chapters of Joshua Carliner's "The Corporate Planet" Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization", which deals with all of this in extensive detail. It is one of the best books on the environment I have come across. Joshua did a very fine review of "Wall Street" for the Nation, so he is not hostile to Marxism. What's interesting, as a matter of fact, is that the book is published by the Sierra Club, so there's some life in that old carcass I suppose. One of the things that doesn't come across nearly as strong as it should in Doug's comments on global capitalism is the illusory quality of "development" in the third world. When Engels wrote "Conditions of the Working Class in England", he was describing insufferable working and living conditions. But to some extent a person reading the book who had the hindsight of history would understand that--like Stalin's Russia in the 1930s--some form of capital accumulation was taking place. Is this true of Thailand today? Or Nigeria? Or Brazil? I don't think so. Louis Proyect
Re: apocalypse
Doug Henwood wrote, The index stands at 167, just below its Gulf War high of 168 - When's the last time you checked, Doug? I looked it up after receiving your message and found the index at 168, tying the GW high. All kidding aside, there's a more serious side to this apocalypse stuff. Rudolf Bultmann (History and Eschatology) and Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending) both present compelling arguments for the importance of apocalypstic narrative in the way that we structure our accounts of history and experience. I wouldn't call those authors deconstructionists, just a good old fashioned theologist and literary critic. The problem is one of finding a recognizable model to explain events that are much larger than ordinary experience. The biggest model we can comprehend is at the scale of the birth-life-death of the creature, so that's the model projected on to "creation". Compare this to Margaret Thatcher's image of the state as a grocery store that has to balance its books. The image is maddeningly naive but very compelling. The hubris of the technician is the dream that with enough detail the mythical origins can somehow be expunged from the model. This is like pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps or lifting the world with a lever. Hans Blumenberg argued that we can never definitively "bring an end to myth." Opposing "science" to myth ultimately results in the mythologizing of the science. What we can do, however, is to consciously *rework* the myth so that it becomes a source of liberating experiment rather than a "mind-forged manacle". I think this is where Blake and Goethe meet Marx and Paine, in the restless reworking of myth. The reworking of myth can never cease, when it does it reverts to mythologizing: stale, suffocating, Stalin, Thatcher . . . the myth that "there is no alternative" -- the bogus claim that the myth "to which there is no alternative" is therefore not a myth. There is *always* an other. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Let Us Now Praise Chossudovsky
Max wrote, let interested parties (if any) please note that in my original post I thought the professor's article sufficiently interesting and substantive to merit a reaction, albeit with some criticisms and questions. I never doubted it. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: apocalypse
Doug Henwood wrote, Speaking of apocalypse, there's actually an apocalypse index on the web, at http://www.novia.net/~todd/rap2.html The index stands at 167, just below its Gulf War high of 168 A couple of questions: Is this out of 167 out of a possible 666? What do they call the units? Lucifers? Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[Fwd: M-I: Global Financial Crisis]
We are indebted to Lou Proyect for forwarding this latest from Chossudovsky. Chossudovsky's trenchant analysis is pointed up by his weak prescriptions, which in stark contrast call only for such sticking-plasters as more regulation of stock markets, and 'An expanding real economy,' which however 'will not occur unless there is a major revamping of economic institutions and a rethinking of macro-economic reform...' In fact, it will not occur at all. Nothing can stop the impending financial collapse. It will bring social turmoil in the metropoles and risings and revolution in many parts of the world, including perhaps crucially, Russia (I have just been reading a remarkable essay about the fate of the Russian working class by V Bilenkin which he may already have posted on M-Gen). In fact, taking Chossudovsky's own starting point, the world economy has been in a continuous chronic deflationary squeeze since the dollar devaluation and collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. This put paid to the great postwar boom, which was characterised by fast rising living standards, full employment and low inflation, following the Korean war ceasefire in 1953. The collapse of Bretton Woods was swiftly followed by the Oil Shock of 1973, which was a direct result of war in the mid-east, and most pertinently of the desire of the OPEC countries to recoup their losses following the 1971 dollar devaluation. But the postwar long boom had already exhausted the growth potential revealed under the tutelage of American world hegemony. Since then, the US has been in a long retreat, and the collapse of the USSR has offered little respite. Vast forces have accumulated on all sides. From being the world's principal provider of capital, responsible in 1945 for more than 80% of global production, the US now depends on seignorage to preserve the dollar's role as currency-of-last resort. Seignorage traditionally goes with being the world's policeman. The Agadir Incident of 1906 put paid the Britain's longtime world dominion and turned gunboat diplomacy into Gilbert and Sullivan farce. The collapse of sterling's world role followed, within the general rout of British imperialism which by 1919 was on its knees before the US. Perhaps the complete humiliation of US diplomacy last week, when it failed to get the world to let it bomb Iraq 'back to the stone age' as one zealous US Navy airwoman put it, is a similar straw in the wind. For the first time that I can remember, the US and its British satellite were isolated. Since the subject was the future of mid-east oil, that is significant. The postwar boom faltered in the 70s because the fundamentals were turning against world capitalism and of the US imperium in the specific form in which it had evolved, ie, as a parasitic system of political and production relations which depended on its historical correlative, the Soviet Union: the survival of each was predicated upon the existence of the other as they circled in a scorpion-like death-dance around one another. The fact that the USSR was the first to succumb should bring no joy to the survivor. The writing is on the wall for the US too. Within the world system as it evolved in the Thirties and crystallised in the Postwar Settlement, strong growth depended on mobilising many new technologies which could take advantage of falling commodity and raw material prices, especially energy. Until the late 60s these factors were as strongly at work in the Soviet bloc as in the industrialised west, thanks to Stalin's success in creating a facsmile of capitalist industry and labour processes under the sign of Soviet socialism. But neither the west nor the less-competitive Soviet bloc ever realised enough surplus capital to mobilise the growing reserve army in the peripheries (colonies, ex-colonies, zones of Soviet influence such as China and India). This failure compounded growing bottlenecks in the centres, particularly in labour-markets, resulting in growing labour-militancy for one thing, as the last French, Italian, Polish, Russian countrydwellers were conscripted to urban labour forces. One might say that the writing had always been on the wall: and it is in Lenin's hand, and the text was written in 1916. The great postwar enrichment of urban centres of culture, embourgeoisement of white-collar workers, the shiny new cities, the freeways and automobiles, hid the truth, just as today's playstation games hide a worse truth in a still more fantasised form, from another generation of proletarians. I do not want to say that in this bifocal world specifically *economic* competition between the blocs was the main thing, it wasn't. The competition was primarily ideological and political, and this trapped the USSR's would-be accommodators with the west into the logic of Lenin-Stalin (even Beria, the first pretender to Stalin's seat, in 1953, immediately began with an overture to the west, sort of a precocious detente; but none of his
apocalypse
Speaking of apocalypse, there's actually an apocalypse index on the web, at http://www.novia.net/~todd/rap2.html The index stands at 167, just below its Gulf War high of 168 - and firmly in the "Alert" zone. Among the contributing factors: Asian stock turmoil, increasing globaliation (the recent signing of a global telecoms agreement pushed this component to its max), the increasing assertiveness of the EU (the "Beast" of the book of Revelation), and the slide in gold prices (perhaps God's way of telling us of the fleetingness of earthly riches). Doug
Re: Global Financial Crisis II
Patrick Bond wrote: The socio-political fallout of some yuppie NY banker's flick of a finger on the keyboard can be terrifying. In SA, a 25% currency crash during a six-week period in 1996 compelled the ANC leadership to formally junk its soc-dem development programme and replace it with a (disfunctional) homegrown SAP, purely for the benefit of the f*ing bond traders, and the ongoing fiscal squeeze is brutal, demonstrably killing ANC constituents. Is this really just the doing of "some yuppie NY banker's" finger-flicking? Or is the FX rate just one mechanism among many that constitute the global economic hierarchy? The fucking bond traders are just one part of a ruling class that includes the top execs of Anglo-American, the Business Roundtable, Chatham House, Bob Rubin - and the comprador elements within the ANC. Not only because it's so US-centric, which it is, but because while everyone and everything else is thinking and acting globally, the concession that capitalism is in ok shape is basically parochial laziness. What does it mean to say that capitalism is in "ok shape"? It means that a polarizing system of exploitation is reproducing itself pretty successfully. The creation of poverty alongside of wealth is an ancient feature of this charming economic form. I didn't think I had to make that point with every post to PEN-L, but apparently I do. Doug
