An old friend, Bob Roth (who, along with his wife Judy accounted for half the guests at my wedding) sent me an article that he wrote called The Third Worldization of the United States Is In Process and Well Along . Bob lives in Eugene, Oregon. He’s been interested in globalization issues for a long time.
Bob gave me permission to put it up on the web, and publish it to my massive readership. The article is longer than a normal post, so I’ve made it into a separate page which you can access by clicking here or by clicking on the “Third Worldization” link at the upper right on the home page.
Herewith the first few paragraphs, the rest is well worth reading:
The U.S. and its economy may be said to have been in a process of “Third Worldization” for some time, from a variety of perspectives. One of the more striking, to me, is the fact that recently an authoritative source suggested the U.S. may (in ten years) lose the AAA rating its debt has enjoyed since ratings began. See Doug Noland’s Credit Bubble Bulletin. I have been carefully reading the Wall Street Journal as well as the CounterPunch coverage of these issues since mid-summer 2007, supplemented by Doug Noland’s postings, Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer and other sources. I have reached the limit of the time I can give to it, but still don’t feel I understand some of the basics; so what must Americans with more limited time and information resources be thinking, & going through? It would be enormously useful, to some extent but by no means solely in connection with the current presidential campaign, to have a short narrative to explain to non-experts just what has been and is going down and present alternatives, both to ameliorate the harm to individuals and households and to minimize the severity and duration of the recession/Depression now underway.
As I write, it’s unclear, at least to me, whether the steps taken recently by the Fed and others may have headed off the worst-case scenario they were designed to address, the immediate continuation of the cascading crisis; was the reflation successful, at least in its own terms? Doug Noland thinks it has bought some time, and that the ultimate cataclysm will be worse. Whether it “works” or not, Michael Hudson (and others) have written that what the feds have done is a trillion-dollar giveaway to Wall Street; that the “system” the trillion-dollar bailout may have saved is only the money-making system of private entities, not a financial structure whose survival is of more general concern; and more generally, regarding the looming battle over whether and how to impose regulation on the presently unregulated financial system that at the very least, led us to the brink of serious disaster, that there is no such thing as an unregulated economy, because the economy will be regulated either by public or by private power (the implication I take from this being, so why not at least try to regulate it in the public interest?). See Michael Hudson, “Nothing for Families and Retirees: A Trillion-Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers” (April 14, 2008) at , and “Packaging deregulation as new, more efficient regulation,” part two of his “Resurrecting Greenspan: Hillary Joins the Vast, Rightwing Financial Conspiracy” (April 17, 2008) at . To my knowledge, the mainstream media have been little or no help and appear to have made their usual contributions to mis- and dis-information. Here is my own most recent attempt to summarize the issues briefly:
Read the rest here.
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