Mark Engler, an analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus, and the author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy warns that the "free trade" corporatists are moving quickly to seize control of economic and trade policy in a new Democratic administration:
Rejecting neo-conservative unilateralism, they want to see a renewed focus on American "soft power" and its instruments of economic control, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) - the multilateral institutions that formed what was known in international policy circles as "the Washington Consensus". These corporate globalists are making a bid to control the direction of economic policy under a new Democratic administration.
Eight years of neo-conservative rule under Bush / Cheney, Engler, notes, has actually polarized the global elites who attend, the annual, ultra-exclusive World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They are upset the unilateralism of U.S. policy these past eight years has undermined much of the "free trade" globalism they had put in place in the eight years under Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. These "free trade" corporatists
are now engaged in a debate about how to rule the world.
Don't think of this as some conspiratorial plot, but as a perfectly commonsensical debate over what policies are in the best interests of those who hire phalanxes of Washington lobbyists and fill the coffers of presidential and congressional campaigns. Many business leaders have fond memories of the "free trade" years of the Bill Clinton administration, when chief executive officer salaries soared and the global influence of multinational corporations surged.
Rejecting neo-conservative unilateralism, they want to see a renewed focus on American "soft power" and its instruments of economic control, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) - the multilateral institutions that formed what was known in international policy circles as "the Washington Consensus". These corporate globalists are making a bid to control the direction of economic policy under a new Democratic administration.
Engler carefully parses articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to highlight the key phrases and terms being used in this debate.
I have a neighbor who directs investments in South America and Europe, who was forced to give up his six bedroom McMansion and move into a townhouse after a brutal divorce. He does not really have strong political views, and has never been willing to strongly condemn Bush, but he has repeatedly explained how reaction against Bush’s policies have made it next to impossible for Americans to do business overseas as easily as they once did.
Engler explains that
Frustrated by Bush's failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return. As a measure of this - the capitalist equivalent of voting with their feet - political analyst Kevin Phillips notes in his new book, Bad Money, that, in 2007, "[h]edge fund employees' contributions to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee outnumbered those to its Republican rival by roughly nine to one".
This quiet revolt of the corporatists is already causing interesting reverberations on the campaign trail. The base of the Democratic Party has clearly rejected the "free trade" version of trickle-down economics, which has done far more to help those hedge-fund managers and private-jet-hopping executives than anyone further down the economic ladder.
Engler notes that both Obama and Clinton are "surrounded by business-friendly advisors" and describes some of the tensions that have bubbled to the surface, such as Clinton advisor Mark Penn being forced to take a hike after his activities on behalf of NAFTA were revealed. Then there is the flap caused by Obama’s senior economic policy adviser, University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee, who met with Canadian government officials to assure them that Obama's stated desire to review NAFTA was merely "political positioning".
Engler raises the key question: why has
Goolsbee, senior economist to the Democratic Leadership Council, the leading organization on the corporate-friendly rightwing of the party, and a person praised as "a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade", been positioned to mold Obama's economic stances in the first place?
Engler concludes by discussing the paradox that the neo-cons’ unilateral attempt to achieve U.S. hegemony have actually created a world that is in open revolt against the policies and goals of the U.S.:
To the chagrin of the "free trade" elite, the market fundamentalist ideas that have dominated international development thinking for at least the past 25 years are now under attack globally. This is largely because the economic prescriptions of deregulation, privatization, open markets and cuts to social services so often made (and enforced) by the IMF and the World Bank have proven catastrophic.
In 2003, the United Nations' Human Development Report explained that 54 already poor countries had actually grown even poorer during the "free trade" era of the 1990s.
SNIP
Such findings led United Nations Development Program administrator Mark Malloch Brown, in a remarkably blunt statement, to call for a "guerilla assault on the Washington Consensus".
SNIP
The countries burned by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, for instance, are now building up huge currency reserves so they never again have to come begging to the IMF (and so suffer diktats from Washington) in times of crisis. Moreover, virtually the whole of Latin America is in revolt.
Engler does not mention the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but the SCO is another important example of how the world community is reorganizing itself to defend itself against the United States and its policies. It was the SCO that played the key role in pressuring the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from Uzbekistan in 2005. China and Russia, the two largest members of the SCO, conducted their first ever joint military exercise in August 2005. Afterwards, Russian officials begun speaking of including India (which has observer status in the SCO), and expanding the SCO to include a military role.
Engler concludes:
Battered by losing wars and economic crisis, the United States is now a superpower visibly on the skids. And yet, there is no guarantee that the coming era will produce a change for the better. In a world in which the value of the dollar is plummeting, oil is growing ever more scarce relative to demand, and foreign states are rising as rivals to American power, the possibility of either going ahead with the Bush/Cheney style of unilateralism or successfully returning to the "enduring and effective" multilateral corporatism of the 1990s may no longer exist. But the failure of these options will undoubtedly not be for lack of trying. Even with corporate globalization on the decline, multinational businesses will attempt to consolidate or expand their power. And even with the imperial model of globalization discredited, an overextended US military may still try to hold on with violence.