On May 19, 9:49=A0am, PaPaPeng <PaPaP...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
> How to rule the world after Bush
> By Mark Engler
> May 20, 2008http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JE20Dj09.html
>
> Picture January 20, 2009, the day George W Bush has to vacate the Oval
> Office.
>
> It's easy enough to imagine a party marking this fine occasion, with
> antiwar protesters, civil libertarians, community leaders,
> environmentalists, health-care advocates and trade unionists clinking
> gl***** to toast the end of an unfortunate era. Even Americans not
> normally inclined to political life might be tempted to join the
> festivities, bringing their own bottles of bubbly to the party.
>
> Given that presidential job approval ratings have rarely broken 40%
> for two years and now remain obdurately around or below 30% - historic
> lows - it would not be surprising if this were a sizeable celebration.
>
> More surprising, however, might be the number of people in the crowd
> drinking finer brands of champagne. Amid the populist gala, one might
> well spot figures of high standing in the cor****ate world, individuals
> who once would have looked forward to the reign of an MBA president
> but now believe that neo-conservative bravado is no way to run an
> empire.
>
> One of the more curious aspects of the Bush years is that the
> self-proclaimed "uniter" polarized not only American society, but also
> its business and political elites. These are the types who gather at
> the annual, ultra-exclusive World Economic Forum in Davos,
> Switzerland, and have their assistants trade business cards for them.
> Yet, despite their sometime chumminess, these powerful few are now in
> disagreement over how American power should be shaped in the post-Bush
> era and increasing numbers of them are jumping ****p when it comes to
> the course the Republicans have chosen to advance these past years.
> They are now engaged in a debate about how to rule the world.
>
> Don't think of this as some conspiratorial plot, but as a perfectly
> commonsensical debate over what policies are in the best interests of
> those who hire phalanxes of Wa****ngton lobbyists and fill the coffers
> of presidential and congressional campaigns. Many business leaders
> have fond memories of the "free trade" years of the Bill Clinton
> administration, when chief executive officer salaries soared and the
> global influence of multinational cor****ations surged.
>
> Rejecting neo-conservative unilateralism, they want to see a renewed
> focus on American "soft power" and its instruments of economic
> control, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
> and World Trade Organization (WTO) - the multilateral institutions
> that formed what was known in international policy circles as "the
> Wa****ngton Consensus". These cor****ate globalists are making a bid to
> control the direction of economic policy under a new Democratic
> administration.
>
> There is little question that the majority of people on the planet -
> those who suffered under both the cor****ate globalization of the
> Clinton years and the imperial globalization of Bush - deserve
> something better. However, it is far from certain that social justice
> advocates who want to encourage a more democratic approach to world
> affairs and global economic well-being will be able to sway a new
> administration. On the other hand, the damage inflicted by eight years
> of neo-con rule and the challenges of an increasingly daunting
> geopolitical scene present a conundrum to the cor****ate globalizers:
> Is it even possible to go back to the way things were?
>
> The revolt of the cor****atists
> Throughout their time in office, despite fulsome evidence of failure,
> Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have maintained a blithe
> self-confidence about their ability to successfully promote the
> interests of the United States, or at least those of their
> high-rolling "Pioneer"-class donors. Every so often, though, the
> public receives notice that loyalists are indeed scurrying to abandon
> the administration's sinking ****p of state. In October 2007, for
> instance, in a front-page story entitled "GOP Is Losing Grip On Core
> Business Vote", the Wall Street Journal re****ted that the party could
> be facing a brand crisis as "[s]ome business leaders are drifting away
> from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt
> and a conservative social agenda they don't share".
>
> When it comes to cor****ate responses to the president's "war on
> terror", we mostly hear about the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater
> - companies directly implicated in the invasion and occupation of
> Iraq, and with the mentality of looters. Such firms have done their
> best to score quick profits from the military machine. However, there
> was always a faction of realist, business-oriented Republicans who
> opposed the invasion from the start, in part because they believed it
> would negatively impact the US economy. As the administration's
> adventure in Iraq has descended into the morass, the ranks of
> cor****ate complainers have only grown.
>
> The "free trade" elite have become particularly upset about the
> administration's focus on go-it-alone nationalism and its disregard
> for multilateral means of securing influence. This belligerent
> approach to foreign affairs, they believe, has thwarted the advance of
> cor****ate globalization. In an April 2006 column in the Wa****ngton
> Post, globalist cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby laid blame for "why
> globalization has stalled" at the feet of the Bush administration. The
> White House, Mallaby charged, was unwilling to invest any political
> capital in the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO. He wrote:
> Fifteen years ago, there were hopes that the end of Cold War splits
> would allow international institutions to acquire a new cohesion. But
> the great powers of today are simply not interested in creating a
> resilient multilateral system ... The United States remains the only
> plausible quarterback for the multilateral system. But the Bush
> administration has alienated too many players to lead the team
> effectively. Its strident foreign policy started out as an
> understandable response to the fecklessness of other powers. But
> unilateralism has tragically backfired, destroying whatever slim
> chance there might have been of a workable multilateral alternative.
> Frustrated by Bush's failures, many in the business elite want to
> return to the softer empire of cor****ate globalization and,
> increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this
> return. As a measure of this - the capitalist equivalent of voting
> with their feet - political analyst Kevin Phillips notes in his new
> book, Bad Money, that, in 2007, "[h]edge fund employees' contributions
> to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee outnumbered those to its
> Republican rival by roughly nine to one".
>
> This quiet revolt of the cor****atists is already causing interesting
> reverberations on the campaign trail. The base of the Democratic Party
> has clearly rejected the "free trade" version of trickle-down
> economics, which has done far more to help those hedge-fund managers
> and private-jet-hopping executives than anyone further down the
> economic ladder.
>
> As a result, both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are
> running as opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement
> (NAFTA) and of a newer bilateral trade deal with Colombia, a country
> in which organizing a union or vocally advocating for human rights can
> easily cost you your life. The tenor of the current campaign
> represents a significant ****ft from the 1990s, when top Democrats were
> constantly trying to establish their cor****ate bona fides and
> "triangulate" their way into conservative economic policy.
>
> Still, both candidates are surrounded by business-friendly advisors
> whose views fit nicely within an older, pre-Bush administration
> paradigm of cor****ate globalization. The tension between the
> anti-NAFTA activists at the base of the party and those in the
> campaign war rooms has resulted in some embarrassing gaffes during the
> primary contest.
>
> For Hillary Clinton, the most notable involved one of her chief
> strategists, Mark Penn, a man with a long, nefarious record defending
> cor****ate abuses as a Wa****ngton lobbyist. As it turned out, Penn's
> consulting firm received US$300,000 in 2007 to sup****t the "free
> trade" agreement with Colombia. Even as Clinton was proclaiming her
> heartfelt opposition to the deal and highlighting the "history of
> suppression and targeted killings of labor organizers" in that
> country, a key player in her campaign was charting strategy with
> Colombian government officials to get the pact passed.
>
> The Obama campaign found itself in similar discomfort in February.
> While the candidate was running in the Ohio primary as an opponent of
> NAFTA, calling that trade deal a "mistake" that had harmed working
> people, his senior economic policy adviser, University of Chicago
> professor Austan Goolsbee, was meeting with Canadian government
> officials to explain, as a memo by the Canadians re****ted, that
> Obama's charges were merely "political positioning".
>
> Goolsbee quickly claimed that his position had been mischaracterized,
> but the incident naturally raised questions. Why, for example, had
> Goolsbee, senior economist to the Democratic Leader****p Council, the
> leading organization on the cor****ate-friendly rightwing of the party,
> and a person praised as "a valuable source of free-trade advice over
> almost a decade", been positioned to mold Obama's economic stances in
> the first place?
>
> If pressure from the base of the party lets up after the elections, it
> would hardly be surprising to see a victorious candidate revert to
> Bill Clinton's cor****ate model for how to rule the world. However, a
> return to a pre-Bush-style of international politics may be easier
> dreamed than done.
>
> The neo-con paradox
> To the chagrin of the "free trade" elite, the market fundamentalist
> ideas that have dominated international development thinking for at
> least the past 25 years are now under attack globally. This is largely
> because the economic prescriptions of deregulation, privatization,
> open markets ...
>
> read more =BB
The current issue of foreign affairs also has an article on world
politics. According to Richard N Haas, the monopolar world dominated
by the U.S. is over. Now we are moving into the age of a disorderly
non-polar world. A lot of different playsers, including nation states
players and non nation states players such as NGOs and multinational
cor****ations.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501faessay87304/richard-n-haass/the-age-o=
f-nonpolarity.html
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