Title: Re: [PEN-L:20542] RE: Baker on external
debt
I have yet to hear a Bushie express
anxiety about the
trade deficit. The fact that foreigners own more
U.S.
assets might mean little to the Bushies if they own the
foreigners.
mbs
good point, max. Robert Gilpin has made it as well:
:
America's cold war allies, fearing that a
collapse of the dollar would
force the U.S. to withdraw its forces from overseas and to retreat
into
political isolation, agreed to hold
overvalued dollars. Also, such export-oriented economies as West
Germany and, at a later date, Japan wished to keep access to the
lucrative American market. Throughout the postwar era the U.S.
always had one primary partner helping it to defend the dollar and
hence the U.S. international position. In the early postwar period,
the American position and support for the dollar were based on
cooperation with the British; this ``special relationshipíí begun
between the First and Second World Wars had been solidified by
wartime experience. The Anglo-Saxons worked together to frame
the Bretton Woods System and reestablish the liberal
international economy. By the late 1960s, however, the relative
decline of the British economy forced Great Britain to pull away from
its close partnership with the U.S. West Germany then replaced Great
Britain as the foremost economic partner of the U.S. and as the main
supporter of the dollar. Throughout the Vietnam War and into the
1970s, the Germans supported American hegemony by holding dollars and
buying American government securities. Inflationary and other
consequences of this new special relationship weakened it in the mid
1970s and eventually led to a fracture in the late 1970s when the
Germans refused to support President Carter's economic policies; the
Germans then joined the French to sponsor the European Monetary
System. Creation of this ``zone of stabilityíí in West Europe was
the first of many efforts to isolate the European economies from the
wild fluctuations of the dollar.
In the 1980s, the
Germans were replaced by the Japanese when, through their investments
in the U.S., the Japanese provided financial backing for Reaganís
economic and military policies. In the 1990s, sporadic informal
cooperation among American, German, and Japanese central banks
supported the international role of the dollar. This cooperation
continued largely due to fear of what would happen to the
international economic and political system if the monetary system
were to break down (The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World
Economy in the 21st Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000]: 61-62
hey speaking about about foreigners, i am looking forward to a
good populist review of the following (say by Lind if he's not too
intoxicated with secular religion of so called liberal nationalism)
so I don't actually have to read it.
Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien'and the
Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary by Joseph Nevins
From
Publishers
Weekly
In 1994 the Clinton administration upped the
neo-protectionist ante by doubling the budget for fences and trained
agents along the border
between
Mexico and the U.S. Journalist Joseph Nevins's Operation
Gatekeeper: The Rise of the `Illegal Alien' and the Remaking of the
U.S.-Mexico Boundary explores this concerted effort to prevent
illegal border crossings in the context of the
mid-90s economic boom and the hundreds of thousands of
legal Mexican immigrants. Examining physical, political and
economic attributes of the Border culture often abstracted in
postmodern literary and cultural criticism, Nevins argues that
Clinton's program has done little to keep undocumented immigrants
from entering but has increased the dangers for them as well as
inflamed anti-immigrant tendencies in the U.S. Mike Davis's
introduction will help draw attention to this astute
book.
Book
Description
By 1994 American anti-immigration rhetoric
had reached a fevered pitch, and throngs of migrants entered the U.S.
nightly. In response, the INS launched Operation
Gatekeeper, the centerpiece of the Clinton
administration's unprecedented effort to
regain control of our borders. In Operation Gatekeeper,
Joseph Nevins details the administration's dramatic overhaul of the
San Diego-Tijauna border-the busiest land crossing in the
world-adding
miles
of new fence and hundreds of trained
agents.
This crackdown came, paradoxically,
at a time when borders were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Even as
new fences were built, the border was enjoying enormous
growth and integration, with nearly 300,000 workers crossing legally
into the U.S. to work.
However, proponents of the project successfully presented the
immigrant not only as a lawbreaker, but
as a threat to
national sovereignty and American society. Nevins shows how this
imagery resonated in a country with a history of racist
anti-immigrant sentiment.
Years later, Operation
Gatekeeper has failed to significantly reduce
