Re: Why a new Resolution is NEEDED.

From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 06:56:48 MST

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    Samantha Atkins writes:
    > If we attack on such weak grounds it could well be the beginning
    > of the end of the US.

    Which may not be so bad. Consider this recent column in the Guardian:

    <<Out of the wreckage

    By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact undermining its own
    imperial rule

    George Monbiot
    Tuesday February 25, 2003
    The Guardian

    [...]

    By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term,
    corporate interests, the US is, paradoxically, threatening its own
    tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international
    agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the
    second world war, have permitted the US to develop its international
    commercial and political interests more effectively than it could have
    done alone.

    The institutions through which it has worked - the security council, the
    WTO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided
    a semblance of legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the
    construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US,
    as it is already beginning to do, to drop this pretence and frankly
    admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission,
    in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it. Effective resistance
    would create the political space in which their citizens could begin to
    press for a new, more equitable multilateralism.

    There are several means of contesting the unilateral power of the US,
    but perhaps the most immediate and effective one is to accelerate its
    economic crisis. Already, strategists in China are suggesting that the
    yuan should replace the dollar as east Asia's reserve currency. Over the
    past year, as the Observer revealed on Sunday, the euro has started to
    challenge the dollar's position as the international means of payment
    for oil. The dollar's dominance of world trade, particularly the oil
    market, is all that permits the US Treasury to sustain the nation's
    massive deficit, as it can print inflation-free money for global
    circulation. If the global demand for dollars falls, the value of the
    currency will fall with it, and speculators will shift their assets into
    euros or yen or even yuan, with the result that the US economy will
    begin to totter.

    [...]

    America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force
    the rest of the world to assert its independence from America. They
    permit the people of the weaker nations to contemplate the global
    democratic revolution that is long overdue.

    >>

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,902365,00.html

    -- 
    


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