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Greider talks about how nations have withdrawn their control from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