Crisis and Hope - Theirs and ours (Noam Chomsky / Boston Review)
Chomsky favner bredt og bruker mange ord, men som han selv sier innledningsvis, "There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation". En smakebit:
In substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. The architects of Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, anticipated that its core principles—including capital controls and regulated currencies—would lead to rapid and relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs that had very strong public support. Mostly, they were vindicated on both counts. Many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “golden age of capitalism.”
The “golden age” saw not only unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures. As Keynes and White were aware, free capital movement and speculation inhibit those options. To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.
Det burde vel ikke være nødvendig å påpeke at frihandelens profeter stadig hevder at "frihandel + demokrati = sant"; at det første og viktigste steget på veien mot demokrati er å åpne for frihandel med Vesten... Jfr også Galbraiths kommentarer om Kinas styrke og deres underutviklede kapitalmarked som jeg postet tidligere... Videre:
Large-scale state intervention in the economy is not just a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, either. On the contrary, the state has always been a central factor in economic development. Once they gained their independence, the American colonies were free to abandon the orthodox economic policies that dictated adherence to their comparative advantage in export of primary commodities while importing superior British manufacturing goods. Instead, the Hamiltonian economy imposed very high tariffs so that an industrial economy could develop: textiles, steel, and much else. The eminent economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the United States as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism,” with the highest tariffs in the world during its great growth period.
"The state has always been a central factor in economic development"... En sterk påstand i lys av de fremherskende neoliberalistiske/neoklassiske memene; men jeg er ikke i tvil om det er riktig, jfr. tidligere ref. til Galbraih jr. og sr, og Reinert.
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