Rob,
The Big Boys/Girls don't have to obey the "laws" of neoliberal economics,
just enforce them on the lesser orders. Take nonwhite Americans. Their
labor is increasingly unneeded in the global economy of microprocessors and
corporate mergers. California has recently built 23 new prisons and one new
university.
Seth Sandronsky
From: Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [CrashList] [Fwd: Asia/Thailand - Economy]
Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 23:49:56 +1000
Greetings, fellow test-dummies.
Also sprach Stratfor:
>>Signs are emerging in Southeast Asia that strongly suggest a
>>relapse of the economic crisis that struck the region in 1997.
>>Ironically, events in Thailand - where the crisis began - are
>>leading indicators of a larger regional trend. The region is caught
>>in vicious cycle: unable to muster the political will to reform
>>economies and steadily unraveling economies that undermine
>>political will. The question now is whether events will be
>>contained in Southeast Asia - or spread north to China and Japan.
A rather disappointingly narrow view of the problem, no? Productive assets
are, as a direct consequence of the '97/'98 orgy of capital destruction: (a)
fewer, (b) owned and controlled by foreign interests [who picked 'em up at
ten cents in the dollar after the currencies hit bottom], (c) producing less
wage power for the workers [ie the local consumers - who must consume of the
remaining capital is going optimally to be valourised]. Add to that my
suspicion that the short-termist speculation partly responsible for the last
outrage has reentered some of these stock and currency markets, and you have
a structural picture du jour just like the '97 structural picture. Only
worse. And, given an IMF short of options (ie funds and credibility), a
picture with more than regional implications.
>>Some, like the South Korean economy, have done better than others.
>>But in general, most Asian nations have been unable to institute
>>the radical, fundamental restructuring that a full, regional
>>recovery would have required. Some, like Indonesia, have simply
>>lacked the wherewithal for reform. Others, like Japan, have lacked
>>the political will to endure the wrenching social costs.
These last two sentences say it all, eh? The very Liberal Modernisation
development model Stratfor's implicitly framing as necessary is contradicted
in the first sentence (ie if there be a universal model for development,
there can't be polities which don't have the wherewithal to develop -
unless, of course, a land of some 214 million is to be consigned to the
dustbin from the beginning, as 'undevelopable', and even an IMF economist
wouldn't get away with that claim - not to mention the challenge that
thousands of warring islands would mount to the discourse of globalisation,
eh).
The last sentence implicitly defines 'the economy' as something other than
'how people get on', indeed opposes the two notions. Didn't ol' Keynes have
something to say about how destroying/neglecting a generation or two (a
couple of billion people in this case) on your way to the promised land is a
logic that makes the development economist's job waaay too easy? And
wouldn't the grand-kiddies of the lost generations get just a tad cross when
they find out that 'gales of creative destructions' do not, in fact, stop,
and that were always marked for the 'destruction' part of the equation?
Anyway, economics has now so far removed itself from the concerns of
political economy (ie real people) that it now can not see why real people
(ones without economics degrees) might think it peculiar to claim an economy
is healthy whilst those who constitute it are being 'wrenched' by its
'costs'.
Oh well, they know best, I s'pose ...
Rob.
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