133 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
133 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
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Underground eXperts United
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Presents...
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[ One World, Ready or Not ] [ By Eric Chaet ]
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____________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________
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"One World, Ready or Not"
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by William Greider, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
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Reviewed by Eric Chaet
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Until this book, Greider was the best analyst I know of about the
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dysfunctional government of the United States. Here, he leaps into a
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brilliant analysis of world-wide political, commercial, and financial
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doings, and their repurcussions on everyone, especially those who work
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for wages.
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There is great information and insight on Japan, China (especially),
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Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Germany, Poland, and Russia. There
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are flashes of aha!-type information about Sweden, Korea, and the Czech
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Republic. Being an American, Greider spends the most time--but by no means
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most of his time--talking about the USA.
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This is a 500 page book, and if you skip a page, you miss something
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important--so I can only give you a glimpse into the essence of the
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book.
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Greider talks about how nations have withdrawn their control from
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international commerce and finance. Multinational corporations take jobs
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and factories out of high-wage and regulated nations, and put the factories
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and jobs in low-wage and unregulated nations--or, as in China, especially,
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where there ARE regulations, but they are AGAINST workers, in favor of
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capitalists.
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As a result, the world has more and more productive capacity and production,
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but fewer and fewer people with the money to buy the products. This makes
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producers all the more desperate to lower costs, which intensifies their
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moving out of high-wage and regulated nations, into low wage and
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unregulated, or
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anti-worker-regulated nations.
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This situation--in which there is more and more productive capacity and
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production, but fewer and fewer people with money to buy the products--is a
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re-play of what occurred before each of the Panics and Depressions of the
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Industrial Revolution's past (especially that of 1929, which brought on the
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rise of fascism)--but, now, on a world-wide scale, in a world-wide,
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increasingly but so far incompletely integrated economy.
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Meanwhile, those who finance multinational corporations are without loyalty
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to any nation or society. Say, a couple of hundred thousand significant
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financial "players," including those who control major banks and hedge
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funds, take advantage of situations in which a nation's politics is
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unrealistic in its relation to the new international commerce. They score
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huge "killings," trading in nations' currencies, and force governments to
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devalue their currencies and to reduce social benefits, in order to remain
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competitive.
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Those who rule nations are caught between the demands of the mass of their
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constituents, to keep wages up and worker-protections in place, and the
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demands of financial capital--that they stop supporting high wages and
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protecting workers--or the money will be withdrawn from their nations and
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sent elsewhere. On the bottom, poor nations bid for investment capital, by
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promising low or no taxes and worker compliance, enforced by police if
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necessary--a way of life in China.
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This is a bare-bones outline of the argument of the book, which is precious.
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But, beyond the argument, equally precious is the detailed nearly-current
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HISTORY of the world we live in NOW--so very different than the history of
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nations we learned in school. It is necessary to understand something of
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book-keeping, accounting, finance, and investment--and I don't know if
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Greider tells you everything you need to know as he goes along, tho he is
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certainly as knowledgeable and clear and careful and reader-respectful a
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writer as any I know of. I'm very grateful to him. He is doing what
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journalists are supposed to be doing.
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Toward the very end of the book, Greider proposes a few ideas on how to
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improve the situation somewhat--tho far from comprehensively. He suggests
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that it is necessary that the governments of nations resume regulating
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international capital transfers, and insist on worker-protections in any
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countries who seek to export into their nations. He likes the ideas of
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Louis O. Kelso, a maverick economist who proposed a system of worker
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ownership of capital on the scale of, say, U.S. ownership of homes by those
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who live in them, subsidized by the U.S. tax code. He wants the U.S. central
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bank, the Federal Reserve, to lend money at low rates of interest to likely
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viable enterprises to be run by the employees, who would never be able to
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own capital otherwise--as opposed to putting new money into the economy to
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keep pace with new production by lending it at low rates of interest to the
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biggest banks, who then (currently) lend it out at higher rates of interest
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to others.
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I've been looking for this book for 20 years. It took me about 2 weeks to
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read--putting aside approximately everything else--after preparing to read
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it for a long, long time. And, toward the end, I read it slower, and slower,
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and slower. There was so much to absorb.
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I feel as tho I know where I am now, much more so than before I read the
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book--and I will certainly behave--how I don't exactly know--differently,
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from here on out. I am playing with a fuller deck of cards, as it were.
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Maybe I will be able to do more good. I will certainly be in a position to
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take better care of myself--tho much of what I learned is about forces much
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larger than myself. The understanding itself, in any case, is precious.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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uXu #582 Underground eXperts United 2001 uXu #582
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1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001
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