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  1. #1
    Senior Member carolinamtnwoman's Avatar
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    Is Major War A Possibility In 2009?

    The following article is written by Frederic F. Clairmont, a prominent Canadian academic and researcher who for many years was a permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United Nations Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD).


    Is A Major War A Possibility In 2009? The Historical Antecedents


    by Dr. Frederic F. Clairmont
    Global Research, February 27, 2009
    2009-02-26



    In these lectures I shall venture to answer some of the queries made regarding the prospects of a major war . The notes to these lectures were scribbled over time in the corner of the living room.

    There are two large standing lamps that illuminate the copy book that I am using to scribble these lines. The thin light black pen is gliding effortlessly over the paper. It is one of my inseparable companions. It is Made in China as well as the copy book with squared paper.

    One of my Associates raised the question the other night: is there any manufactured products that American capitalism can produce that China cannot produce better and in greater quantities and considerably cheaper?


    This is not fanciful speculation. It therefore follows whether American capitalism in its current state of indebtedness, mass impoverishment and financial disintegration will be able to compete internationally. Or put it another way: how and by what means will it pay for its imports, for what it consumes? Will it be able – on present evidence it is not – to shave and ultimately to eliminate its trade deficit by exporting more than it imports? Further, can the dollar be an acceptable medium of payment and exchange given the battering to which it has been unrelentingly subjected for many years? The observation by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Greenback is worth less than used toilet paper is ungracious, but it is shared by many leading spirits in the world of finance capitalism.

    In subsequent lectures we shall explore the ramifications of these issues. Suffice it to say that it is a matter of life and death that takes us into the deepest reaches of the conflictual contradictions within world capitalism and the imperialist lethal that I have will give you more than an idea of what is meant when we say that China has become the industrial hub of our planet; as well as an idea of what we mean when we speak of financial imbalances. Of that more later.

    The Ramifications

    Some of you have evoked the possibility of a world conflict in the course of 2009.. I shan’t say that this prediction is far-fetched; or remote. Doubtless, many of you do not mean a regional conflict as in Ossetia and Gaza . Nor do I exclude the possibility of the US / Israel on Iran . In the making of war, madness can never be excluded. Let us keep in mind that the US caste oligarchy (USCO) and its trillion dollar militarist appendage is at war on several front in areas engulfing tens of thousands of kilometers: It is pursuing a war in Gaza via its surrogate; it is pursuing a war in Iraq; and of course it is escalating its military drive in Afghanistan; it has extended its killing fields to Pakistan. Recall that Pakistan has a frontier of 2,500 kms with Afghanistan .

    Such a possibility cannot be ignored. How does one approach the subject? What is the most appropriate method? I am aware that itemizing the potential flashpoints gives us individual dots but the dots are not connected. They remain separate and cannot provide an insight of the detonator. I am sympathetic to your speculation. The historian must select his facts This is a matter of personal choice. But how and to what purpose he selects his facts stems from his principle of selectivity that is a part of a process of abstraction.

    His selection and his interpretation of events are thereby conditioned by his ideological and philosophical predilections. His class affiliations. His personal experience. One may itemize a list but itemizing single events do not give us a handle to comprehend these complex phenomena.. The assassination of Kronprinz Franz Josef by a young Serb nationalist was certainly the detonator but it tells us very little without disentangling the complex of nationalist convulsions and economic and dynastic rivalries that shredded the vitals of the world economy. Nor can we ignore the military naval buildup of the German empire that challenged the centuries old supremacy of the Royal Navy. As David Lloyd George - the shrewdest of imperial artisans and a paramount Hatchet man the Great War noted : “if 1914 had not come when it did it would have inevitably come laterâ€

  2. #2
    Senior Member carolinamtnwoman's Avatar
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    The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag

    BNET Monthly Review , May, 1997 by John Cavanagh


    In 1960, United Nations economist Frederic Clairmont published a searing indictment of free trade and economic liberalism entitled The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism. This year, in the midst of the raging global debate over NAFTA, the new World Trade Organization and other instruments of free trade, Clairmont has reworked the original text, updated it, and added lengthy introductions and conclusions that cover developments over the last four decades.

    Clairmont's contributions are both empirical and historical. On the empirical front, Clairmont's dazzling juxtapositions of statistics dispel once and for all the idea that in the era of the modern transnational corporations, nothing close to free market conditions exist anywhere in the world. Clairmont's contributions in this realm are based on decades of research.

    After the original publication of Economic Liberalism, Frederic Clairmont became one of the most original social scientists and creative researchers in the vast United Nations system. His three United Nations studies on corporate control of the banana, tobacco, and then fibers and textiles sectors analyze the impact of concentrated corporate power on peasants, prices, marketing, and the entire development process.

    Clairmont's meticulous calculations, updated in this book, describe how the world's top 200 firms controlled almost a quarter of the planet's economic output by 1980. He has uncovered the fight oligopolistic control of industry after industry by a handful of global giants.

    In Economic Liberalism's powerful new introduction, Clair-mont tours us through the recent waves of mergers and acquisitions that has led to the further consolidation of the Top 200 firms. Clairmont claims that 60 percent of international trade is now intra-firm transfers among units of the same giant firms; other figures place the total at 30-40 percent. Whichever is correct, a huge segment of international trade escapes any of the so-called "laws" of supply and demand; prices are set according to the internal dictates of private firms.

    This statistical tour-de-force adds power to Clairmont's critique of David Ricardo's conceptualization of the wonders of comparative advantage in which all benefit from England exporting cloth and Portugal exporting wine. In Clairmont's words: "Free trade, and the nostrum of comparative advantage, has foundered on the rocks of capitalist concentration and its corollaries. Inasmuch as the TNC conglomerates own and control the modern counterpart of Portuguese wineries and British cotton textile plants, they are the winners on all fronts."

    A major theme of the introduction is that global firms have taken firm control of the reins of the State. Clairmont describes former U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's "war room" where corporations openly ruled. Yet as Clairmont explains, government serving corporate expansion has deep roots in British imperial history.

    The meat of Economic Liberalism is a dissecting of the British version of free trade and its devastating consequences on the world's second most populous nation: India. The new introduction and conclusion also offer an update of the supplanting of British imperial power by the United States after the Second World War. Clairmont describes the passing of the baton of global economic hegemony at the historic conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and the more recent deployment of economic liberalism around the world by the United States, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. This section includes a fascinating history of the brutality of the U.S. government's world view, from George Washington's opinion of Native Americans ("Indians have nothing human except the shape...") to State Department Policy Planning Study number 23 in 1948 ("We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.... In this situation...our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity"). Free trade, Clairmont reminds us, has always been "a doctrine of one social class... that would be deployed ruthlessly to cut down another social class...."

    A meticulous economic historian, Clairmont digs out the intellectual rationalization of free trade and economic liberalism by British politicians, businessmen and ideologues of the late 1700s and 1800s. A British ideologue wrote in 1832: "It is clearly seen that to our beloved Great Britain has been assigned the high mission of manufacturing for her sister nations. Our kin beyond the sea shall send to us in our ships their cotton from the Mississippi valley, India shall contribute its jute, Russia its hemp and flax, and ironstone for our factories and workshops...."

    Clairmont traces the roots of the industrial revolution in England and economic classes that benefitted. He then shows the losers from these policies, focussing on America, Germany, and India. Clairmont's Indian case study exposes the worst of what he calls the "savage whiplash of economic liberalism." British imperial policy in India "led to the annihilation of Indian manufacturing" as the nation was pressed to produce cotton, indigo, and tea for the British market. Pre-British India has been a nation of skilled crafts people: producing intricate textiles in Hindustan; iron, brass, and copper in Benares, Tanjore, Poona, and elsewhere; as well as shipbuilding, jewelry, stone carving, ivory, glass, tannery, perfume, and paper-making. Revenues from the Indian empire enriched the colonial master and funded British wars in Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Aden, Rangoon, China, and Afghanistan.

    The destruction of Indian manufactures is analyzed in detail. Indian silk and other textiles had been exported in large quantities before 1815 and easily underpriced British items. Then, in the name of free trade, British levied prohibitive duties as high as 1,000 percent on these articles. Meanwhile, duties of British textiles into India were set at three and one half percent on most items. An urban-rural migration ensued in India and the British imposed the exploitative British landlord system on the colony, which would be the source of countless peasant revolts in years to come. Plantations, some using slave labor, spread in cotton, sugar, wheat, and other cash crops. Rising exports of food and cash crops would coincide with mass famine for the next century. Clairmont writes: "As Ireland had been laid waste by mercantilist economic policies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so was India to be ravaged by liberal economic policies often indistinguishable in their rapacity from their mercantilist predecessors."

    One of the great contributions of Economic Liberalism is the fascinating reminder of the extraordinary history of human resistance to the onslaught of economic liberalism, beginning with the American colonies, and later in India, Germany, Japan, China, and elsewhere. Clairmont starts with the writings of Alexander Hamilton and other exponents of deploying the state to protect "infant industries" and to promote industrialization. His most interesting passages focus on Frederich List, the nineteenth century German who laid out the argument on the specificity of economic liberalism to Great Britain at that time, and why it was a force of destruction elsewhere. List helped provide an intellectual underpinning for protectionism and state interventionism (and for the emptiness of the notion of the "comparative advantage") in both the rapidly expanding American economy and later in Germany.

    List's ideas would gain force again in the third quarter of the 20th century in the East Asian miracles of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and help generate the fastest growth rates in the world at that time.

    Beginning in the early 1980s with the rise of Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, economic liberalism emerged as the dominant ideology around the world. Enhanced in their power by the Third World debt crisis, the World Bank and IMF have spread policy packages of economic liberalism to over 100 developing nations. In the 1990s, the United States and its allies have further accelerated the free trade juggernaut with NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and negotiations for new trade agreements around the world.

    Yet, Clairmont reminds us that the juggernaut is not without severe contradictions. The corporate behemoths that are so skilled at carving out new overseas markets are slashing workers by the hundreds of thousands. Unemployment soars across Europe and in much of the Third World. Around the world, real wages are stagnating or falling. Inequalities of obscene scales are deepening all over. Clairmont concludes that the system's ultimate demise lies in "Millions and millions of working men and women driven into superfluity by the system are the Achilles heel...."

    Indeed, in the midst of these conditions, a backlash to corporate globalization is emerging across the planet. One segment of it is intensely nationalistic and racist, led by Pat Buchanan and his counterparts in France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. Similar anti-globalization sentiments are found in the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam in Algeria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Muslim world.

    Yet, other segments of a more progressive backlash are also evident. Indian farmers, by the hundreds of thousands, have taken to the streets against Cargill and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Philippine citizen groups almost defeated that country's accession to the new World Trade Organization. Networks of workers, farmers, environmentalist and others in Canada, the United States, and Mexico almost defeated NAFTA. Workers in France halted government cutbacks.

    These movements represent a new "third way" between the ravages of the free traders and the racism of the protectionists. Participants in this new wave of resistance would do well to learn from the rich history of several centuries of resistance to free trade. Frederic Clairmont's Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism is a good place to start.

    Former U.S. Trade Commissioner Mickey Kantor, on economics and politics:

    "Economics and politics have never been closer," he added [in an address to a meeting of leading financial officers of giant corporations]. "We are in each other's pocket. We are joined at the hip economically.... It's only natural that companies will influence countries' policies," Kantor said.

    - The San Juan Star, February 11, 1997

    John Cavanagh is co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author with Richard J. Barnet of Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (Simion & Schuster, 1994).


    http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... i_20803629

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