In a number of respects the US now resembles an emerging country more than the advanced economy it was some decades ago. Its industrial base is largely gone, sold off or off-shored, and its public infrastructure is in visible disrepair. Because of the severity of the real estate collapse, parts of its housing stock are being abandoned and once-thriving neighbourhoods are now slums.
Like Britain, whose global position became untenable long before it was destroyed in the course of the Second World War, America continues to act as if it can lead the world while its power is inexorably leaking away.
The days of the dollar as the world's reserve currency are numbered.
Among recent experiments in engineering the free market in late twentieth-century conditions, those in Britain, New Zealand and Mexico are particularly notable. [...] Kelsey summarizes the upshot of the New Zealand experiment by observing 'The result of a decade of radical structural adjustment was a deeply divided society.' More generally, she comments that 'In less than a decade, New Zealand had gone from a bastion of welfare interventionism to a neo-liberal's paradise. Real economic and political power had shifted outside the realms of the central state. In this process of what might be termed "privatization of power", citizens were reduced to consumers in the economic rather than the political market-place.' There is much evidence to support these assessments. One estimate put 17.8 per cent of the New Zealand population under the poverty line in 1991.
The destruction of Chinese traditions in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution went in tandem with the degradation of China's natural environment. In a characteristically hubristic Maoist programme designed to eradicate all pests, war was declared on China's sparrows. The sparrows were exterminated, resulting in a plague of the insects the sparrows had controlled, and consequent damage to crops.
The spread of new technologies throughout the world is not working to advance human freedom. Instead it has resulted in the emancipation of market forces from social and political control. By allowing that freedom to world markets we ensure that the age of globalization will be remembered as another turn in the history of servitude.
False Dawn. The delusions of global capitalism - John Gray
Like Britain, whose global position became untenable long before it was destroyed in the course of the Second World War, America continues to act as if it can lead the world while its power is inexorably leaking away.
The days of the dollar as the world's reserve currency are numbered.
Among recent experiments in engineering the free market in late twentieth-century conditions, those in Britain, New Zealand and Mexico are particularly notable. [...] Kelsey summarizes the upshot of the New Zealand experiment by observing 'The result of a decade of radical structural adjustment was a deeply divided society.' More generally, she comments that 'In less than a decade, New Zealand had gone from a bastion of welfare interventionism to a neo-liberal's paradise. Real economic and political power had shifted outside the realms of the central state. In this process of what might be termed "privatization of power", citizens were reduced to consumers in the economic rather than the political market-place.' There is much evidence to support these assessments. One estimate put 17.8 per cent of the New Zealand population under the poverty line in 1991.
The destruction of Chinese traditions in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution went in tandem with the degradation of China's natural environment. In a characteristically hubristic Maoist programme designed to eradicate all pests, war was declared on China's sparrows. The sparrows were exterminated, resulting in a plague of the insects the sparrows had controlled, and consequent damage to crops.
The spread of new technologies throughout the world is not working to advance human freedom. Instead it has resulted in the emancipation of market forces from social and political control. By allowing that freedom to world markets we ensure that the age of globalization will be remembered as another turn in the history of servitude.
False Dawn. The delusions of global capitalism - John Gray
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