>
> Collapse in Cancun
> by Doug Henwood
>
> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031027&s=henwood
>
>
"As the results of the ministerial show, the WTO was never really the
institution its critics said it was. From the outset, it wasn't really
dominated by big capital in the rich countries. It's a one-country,
one-vote system, like the UN's General Assembly. The rich countries,
especially the United States, don't like this arrangement. They prefer the
Security Council, with its big power vetoes."
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But while Bush asked the nation on Thursday to be more optimistic and look beyond the negative headlines from Iraq, Cheney barely mentioned the hardships in Iraq. Instead, he took aim at Democrats and foreign leaders, such as French President Jacques Chirac and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who have raised objections to U.S. "unilateralism."
Cheney blasted the criticism "that the United States, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent" -- a clear reference to U.N. procedures, under which "the mere objection of even one foreign government would be sufficient to prevent us from acting.
"Though often couched in high-sounding terms of unity and cooperation, it is a prescription for perpetual disunity and obstructionism," Cheney said, adding that this would "confer undue power" on dissenters, "while leaving the rest of us powerless to act in our own defense. Yet we continue to hear this attitude in arguments in our own country -- so often, and so conveniently, it amounts to a policy of doing exactly nothing."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7648-2003Oct10.html
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I think we all agree that the unilateralism of the American Right is far more problematic than the shortcomings of some leftists attempts to understanding 21st century political ecologies of technology, trade labor and property. We can learn; they can't. They no longer know how to see the future[s] as anything other than a threat.....
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> From the Zygmunt Bauman interview Michael Pugliese posted yesterday:
There are not, and hardly could be, local solutions to global problems. Globally incubated problems need to be tackled globally. The global 'space of flows', in which politics could be effective, is thoroughly cleansed of politics - that has been entrapped in the 'space of places', where it is doomed to remain ineffective. We have no 'global civil society', no 'global legal code', no 'global judiciary', no 'global ethics', and most conspicuously no 'global democracy' (beware of confusing inter-state bargaining with global politics!) And bridges leading from the present-day political 'balkanisation' of the Earth to any form of politics matching the present-day globality of economics are, frankly speaking, nowhere in sight. The floating, short-lived ad hoc coalitions of selected states patched together for the duration of successive crises reinforce rather than mitigate the political fragmentation.
Well, modern states did not emerge from inter-communal conferences, or as federations of parishes and townships. They were born and grew up in dogfights with 'local particularisms', and at the expense of expropriating the locally based powers of a greater part of their pre-modern authority. One wonders whether the same operation won't have to be repeated, two centuries later - but this time on a global scale. I suspect that non-governmental movements and organisations, deliberately ignoring state boundaries and paying little attention to state institutions, could be seen as manifestations of that premonition, and as experimental, trial-and-error attempts to act on it. There is a genuine, and growing, 'civic disengagement' from 'politics as we know it' - the kind of politics that has been developed through modern history to fit and serve the political integration into 'nation-states'. But it would be wrong to identify present trends as a retreat from politics as such. Political interests, hopes and postulates, uncoupled from the extant political institutions, are these days seeking new havens in which to anchor. They will have to confront at some point the fact that the sought-after havens have not been yet constructed - and before casting anchor, they must be built first. The agora meeting the needs of the globalised planet would be a site of translating individual and local problems into global issues .
<snip>
I admit as well that people paving the way for the global juggernaut (whether they wave the face-saving 'third way' banner or not) have a point. The pressures of an already global capitalism are overwhelming (the planet is just about to turn into one huge and indivisible playground of market forces, with no shelter left) and (in the short term at least) the citizens of the countries that refuse to play will have to pay the price of disobedience. Given that we are all now, willy-nilly, players, stakes and pawns in that global game, we are all dependent on each other, and from that global inter-dependence there is no retreat. Karl Marx charged with utopianism those early socialists who wished to declare the capitalist departure null and void and go back to the comfy/friendly guild and parish to start socialist reform from there. I believe that the same charge can be made against those among us who hope to annul our new global interdependence and call Israel back to its nation-state tents . Capitalism has now bolted from its nation-state stables and into the global space, and to capture it once more, tamed and drilled to obey ethical and legal rules, one must follow it into that space.
<snip>
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Capital really did try with the WTO to make something even more cozy than what it's gotten from the IMF/WB; 'it' failed. They're all going to go down.
Think smarter. Quickly.
Ian