Hi Brian,
You would have to go a long way to find a more tendentious article
("America's Empire Rules an Unbalanced World" by Robert Hunter Wade).
I feel as an English taxpayer (who is partially paying for Professor Wade's
salary) I should apologise to any Americans on FW list for this travesty.
The US is far from perfect, is just as selfish in protecting its own
interests as any other country and perhaps flings its weight around
somewhat more than most, but I still prefer to think of it as basically
decent-minded and trying to help the world rather than abuse it. It was
American generosity (Lend Lease) that helped Europe get on its feet after
WWII. And it was American generosity in allowing Japanese imports into the
country that allowed Japan to get on its feet also. It was American support
of NATO that prevented most of Western Europe collapsing into the arms of
the USSR -- and look where we would be if that had happened.
If there is going to be the sort of unpredictability that Geoffrey Owen
forecast in the article I copied into FW ("The Age of Enterprise"), then
you can be sure that America will probably suffer (with the possible
exception of China).
Keith Hudson
At 07:17 04/01/02 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
> Keith,
> the following article suggests some very predictable unfoldings.
> Brian McAndrews
>
> Published on Thursday, January 3, 2001 in the International Herald Tribune
> America's Empire Rules an Unbalanced World by Robert Hunter Wade
>"""""""" 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. "" contributed this
>comment to the International Herald Tribune. Copyright � 2002 the
>International Herald Tribune### Share This Article With Your Friends FAIR
>USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
>always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making
>such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of
>environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific,
>and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of
>any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US
>Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material
>on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
>prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
>educational purposes. For more information go to:
>http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use
>copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond
>'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
> Common Dreams NewsCenter
>& views for the progressive community.
>
>
__________________________________________________________
�Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow
_________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_________________________________________________
