No need to apologize. This is a good point and part of what Hardt and Negri were getting at in Empire. It was interesting that in the column someone posted here, the rightwing Antiwar.com editor made an issue of the fact that the anarchist/libertarian Chomsky would point to international laws to condemn U.S. power plays. The rightwinger rightly said that an international force would be needed to back up the laws.
Maybe Chomsky doesn't really believe in the good of the UN or international laws, but merely tries to use them to bog down the most powerful country? (This is what I think Yoshie does as well, perhaps) A piece in today's New York Times on the deteriorating relationship between the US and our top Latin American buddy, Argentina [i.e. the only Latin American country to take part in the Persian Gulf war and to vote consistently with the United States on issues like human rights violations in Cuba] reminded me of what might be H&N's flaw in Empire: "Argentina's default on its $141 billion public debt and its 'violation of contracts across the board is a major challenge to the governability of global capitalism,' Dr. Escude said, 'and whether the U.S. likes it or not, it has the main responsibility to maintain the rules of the game.'"
> For example, Standard and Poors and Moody's bond rating
agencies basically
>supercede the authority of local accounting and securities
regulation
>regimes. Either borrowers meet the standard of these agencies
or they don't
>get access to the global debt markets. Isn't that an example of
people
>forming relationships outside of the compulsion of state power,
albeit a
>capitalist one?
You're right to highlight the importance of the credit rating agencies. There was an interesting, brief piece in the New Yorker a week or two ago on how a downgrade by the ratings agencies can really hurt a company. These agencies are backed by state power, however, which was what part of the piece was about. I tried to find a web link for it, but was unable to. Less independent than the credit rating agencies, is the politically-connected, completely shady accounting industry (which is global: Anderson is in hundreds of countries). Neo-liberalism has taken a couple of broadsides with the Andersen/Enron collapse and the collapse of Argentina.
> After all, capitalists treat each other very well. If we all
got the
>respect that the capitalist class give one another, the
liberal-democratic
>state would begin to look like the socialist/anarcho-syndicalist
state.
Yes, as the Enron collapse demonstrated, it's socialism for the rich, the cold logic of the "free market" for the poor and working stiffs.
Peter