LOWELL, Mass ---- birth city of Jack Keroauc
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I walked on, filled with perfect memories of the world of the night, all of them somehow so striking and miraculously "English," as if I had actually lived through it all as an american english. I stopped in ecstasy on Market St., to reconstruct the events that the United States, the number one contender for the position of world policeman, already practiced in the Reagan era, in absolute contrast to its monetarist doctrine, paralleling a hyper-statist Keynesianism, constantly expanding, through gigantic processes of internal and external debt, historically unparalleled, the unproductive arms economy and, with it, the disguised role that the state economy occupies in its reproduction, thus ruining itself to the point of having to beg alms from its allies for its military intervention in the Persian Gulf... (I accidentally walked from the fish and chips apartment to ********, and as I climbed the steep steps of the building, I realized that only in San Francisco and Lowell, Mass., were there steps like that, and nights so Goudtrichesque and suggestive of the future. Perhaps: at the same time, the monetarist police of the United States and Great Britain caused the decay of the internal social and economic structures to so far surpass the general and average level of Western countries that, in this respect too, by truly resonating with THE CRISIS, there was an attempt to usurp the government precisely by that power that monetarism wanted to definitively remove: namely, LEVIATHAN, the monster of the state economy, which always rises like the PHOENIX from the ashes when the market reaches the end of its "wisdom."
Post script
ResponderExcluirCrusade for Understanding"
ResponderExcluirNixon's worldview, which bore little resemblance to that of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was entirely compatible with recent business thinking on how to achieve global stability. J. Edgar Hoover's view of the USSR was rejected. The Kremlin was (in fact!) composed not of international conspirators, but of pragmatic managers, far more interested in defending their borders, developing their own consumer economy, and controlling their own populations than instigating revolutions in other countries. A newer, more relaxed view of how to treat underdeveloped societies also prevails. Ideological purity and national pride, which were at the core of old Cold War strategies, are now seen in corporate boardrooms as too costly. "National differences must not be allowed to prevent peoples from doing what is in their mutual interest," said Henry Ford II. "This is the basic philosophy of multinational corporations, and the world will be a better place when this philosophy gains wider acceptance in other aspects of human behavior."
In late 1972, David Rockefeller spoke to the board about his own diplomatic efforts, a major tour of Latin America that included a nationwide televised award ceremony at the office of the President of Colombia, attended by three former presidents. "The President said things that I thought would be difficult for any Latin American president to say about a name so closely associated with capitalism." Noting that "often, the more democratic the country, the more hostile it is to foreign investment," the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank noted that this was not the case in Colombia, which he "apparently" (laughter) considered a democracy. Different companies have different foreign policies, depending on their interests. Sears, for example, had a much less optimistic view of Colombia at the time than Mr. Rockefeller's bank. This is for the obvious reason, the Sears vice president later commented, that banks have little to fear from a move toward a more closed economy since they can lend money to governments, but a consumer bazaar like Sears makes money only where pure private enterprise flourishes unhindered!
ResponderExcluirSometimes "being left to our own devices" means that global corporations actually formulate American foreign policy toward the countries where they operate. This became obvious in the cases of company-owned countries like Honduras, which belonged to United Fruit, and Liberia, which was a Firestone fiefdom. Private hunting grounds. "We must gut the country's fledgling economy in order to expand and further our objectives. We must prolong its turbulent life; the wind must fill only our sails and the water wet only our keels," a United Fruit manager wrote to a company lawyer, commenting on the situation in Honduras in 1920. In 1931, the company employed armed gangs to intimidate striking workers. Company planes were used to kidnap strike leaders and take them to El Salvador. Company thugs destroyed competitors' banana shipments with machetes on railroad platforms. In 1920, Firestone loaned money to the bankrupt Liberian government, in exchange for which the government agreed to accept an American financial advisor, give the company control of the country's only bank and the raising of all other domestic loans, and grant it the distribution of all major American- and European-made consumer goods.
ResponderExcluirIt was simply absurd to talk about an American foreign policy toward these countries that diverged in the slightest from that of United Fruit and Firestone.
ResponderExcluirThe American government needs to give companies more room to play truly relevant roles in formulating operational foreign policy; there are many points of divergence, and the arguments that the financial market is liberal or politically defined seem out of place in this discussion. Liberalizing forces, political labels, make no difference most of the time.
United Fruit (or Brands) sold off part of its Central American plantations to focus on marketing bananas from other producers under the "Chiquita" brand, which is a more profitable and less politically sensitive way of doing business. Liberia repaid its loans. Until
To what extent is the success of some previous American administrations linked to the power that big business had to shape State Department policy? The Nixon administration changed the policy of its predecessors in 1970 when the National Security Council approved a classified document, NSSM 39, which, according to a report leaked to The New York Times, called for "deliberately expanded contacts and communications with the white governments of southern Africa." While some arguments justifying this policy change were strategic (access to the Indian Ocean, for example), the main reason was to adjust foreign policy to the reality that big American companies had long ago created!
ResponderExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirPERSPECTIVES (Charles Tilly)
ResponderExcluirLet me confess upfront: my reading of the European past is unconventional, unproven, and full of gaps. For the most part, scholars of European states have prudently avoided producing thousand-year syntheses. Those who have made the leap have generally either sought to explain what was distinctive about the West as a whole, or proposed a single standard trajectory of state formation, or both. They have usually proceeded retrospectively, preferring to trace the origins of the states we now know, like Germany or Spain, and ignoring the states that disappeared along the way rather than attempting to map the entire gamut of state formation.
When I assert the existence of multiple trajectories due to the relative ease with which capital and coercion became concentrated, when I attest to a strong interdependence between the form of a state and its prior access to capital, and when I seek to pursue a prospective rather than a retrospective analysis of transformations in the structure of the state, I am abandoning the established paths of sterile academicism in favor of an adventure in rethinking the past. Furthermore, by discussing a thousand years in just over 200 pages, I can only hope to identify some important relationships and illustrate how they operated.
ResponderExcluirFrom the book: COERCION, CAPITAL AND EUROPEAN STATES, by Charles Tilly!