Globalization and its discontents.

• Author: Cohen, Mitchel

"My approach to Africa is in some ways like me Japanese approach to Asia, and my approach is not necessarily humanitarian? It is in the long-range interests of access to resources and the creation of markets for American goods and services."

Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the United Nations during the presidency of Jimmy Carter

"It's pretty straightforward," said former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who has been one of the leading advocates of forcing Hussein from power.

"France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them." But he added: "If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them." (1)

The administration of Clinton/Gore successfully rammed legislation through Congress that is essential to the globalization of capital--NAFTA, GATT, WTO, genetic engineering, emergence of coordinated federal police apparatus, the mass construction of prisons, and continued imposition of the death penalty. This legislation could never have been passed under George Bush, Sr., and it is why, despite the melodrama of politicians challenging Bill Clinton's sex life, the vast majority of the global corporate power structure financed and supported Clinton's presidential campaigns. Clinton/Gore continued the policies of Bush, Sr., whose job was to hammer the often disparate elements of the ruling class into a unified strategy, which he called the "New World Order." Bush used the bombing of Iraq in 1991 as the basis for knocking that global strategy into place.

Then came the need to consolidate that program. Regardless of what any of the individuals in the administration believed, the Clinton/Gore administration's policies succeeded where Bush would have failed, dividing and co-opting the potential opposition to globalization--big labor unions, the big environmental groups, and important sectors of the Black community--into supporting the program of global capital.

Now those institutions are in place. They are shaky, however, due to the vast movement against the global debt owed to Western banks and the growing worldwide movement against the globalization of capital (including control of the world's oil production and imposition of the IMF/World Bank's structural...