Inzet oorlog in Irak: Euro vs dollar

quote:

---

Op zaterdag 12 april 2003 15:30 schreef SuperG het volgende:
maar waren de VN leden nog steeds aan het diplomatiek bakkeleien over VN Irak inspectie resoluties en werden aan het lijntje gehouden door saddam.

---

quote:

---

What is being planned in Iraq is not reconstruction but robbery

On April 6, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: there will be no role for the UN in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably longer than that". And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country's future will have been made by their occupiers. "There has to be an effective administration from day one," Wolfowitz said. "People need water and food and medicine, and the sewers have to work, the electricity has to work. And that's coalition responsibility."
The process of how they will get all this infrastructure to work is usually called "reconstruction". But American plans for Iraq's future economy go well beyond that. Rather than rebuilding, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neo-liberals can design their dream economy: fully privatised, foreign-owned and open for business.

The $4.8m management contract for the port in Umm Qasr has already gone to a US company, Stevedoring Services, and there are similar deals for airport administration on the auction block. The United States Agency for International Development has invited US multinationals to bid on everything from rebuilding roads and bridges to distributing textbooks. The length of time these contracts will last is left unspecified. How long before they meld into long-term contracts for water services, transit systems, roads, schools and phones? When does reconstruction turn into privatisation in disguise?

Republican congressman Darrel Issa has introduced a bill that would require the defence department to build a CDMA cellphone system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit "US patent holders". As Farhad Manjoo noted in the internet magazine Salon, CDMA is the system used in the US, not in Europe, and was developed by Qualcomm, one of Issa's most generous donors.

Then there's oil. The Bush administration knows it can't talk openly about selling Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves that to people like Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi petroleum minister and executive director of the Center for Global Energy Studies. "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country. The only way is to partially privatise the industry," Chalabi says.

He is part of a group of Iraqi exiles that has been advising the state department on how to implement privatisation in such a way that it isn't seen to be coming from the US. Helpfully, the group held a conference in London on April 6 and called on Iraq to open itself up to oil multinationals shortly after the war. The Bush administration has shown its gratitude by promising that there will plenty of posts for Iraqi exiles in the interim government.

Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.

It's no surprise that so many multinationals are lunging for Iraq's untapped market. It's not just that the reconstruction will be worth as much as $100bn; it's also that "free trade" by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately. More and more developing countries are rejecting privatisation, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush's top trade priority, is wildly unpopular across Latin America. World Trade Organisation talks on intellectual property, agriculture and services have all got bogged down amid accusations that the US and Europe have yet to make good on past promises.

So what is a recessionary, growth-addicted superpower to do? How about upgrading from Free Trade Lite, which wrestles market access through backroom bullying at the WTO, to Free Trade Supercharged, which seizes new markets on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars? After all, negotiations with sovereign countries can be hard. Far easier to just tear up the country, occupy it, then rebuild it the way you want. Bush hasn't abandoned free trade, as some have claimed, he just has a new doctrine: "Bomb before you buy".

It goes much further than one unlucky country. Investors are openly predicting that once privatisation takes root in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will all be forced to compete by privatising their oil. "In Iran, it would just catch like wildfire," S Rob Sobhani, an energy consultant, told the Wall Street Journal. Pretty soon, the US may have bombed its way into a whole new free trade zone.

So far, the press debate over the reconstruction of Iraq has focused on fair play: it is "exceptionally maladroit", in the words of the European Union's commissioner for external relations, Chris Patten, for the US to keep all the juicy contracts for itself. It has to learn to share: Exxon should invite France's TotalFinaElf to the most lucrative oil fields; Bechtel should give Britain's Thames Water a shot at the sewer contracts.

But while Patten may find US unilateralism galling, and Tony Blair may be calling for UN oversight, on this matter it's beside the point. Who cares which multinationals get the best deals in Iraq's pre-democracy, post-Saddam liquidation sale? What does it matter if the privatising is done unilaterally by the US, or multilaterally by the US, Europe, Russia and China?

Entirely absent from this debate are the Iraqi people, who might - who knows? - want to hold on to a few of their assets. Iraq will be owed massive reparations after the bombing stops, but in the absence of any kind of democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatisation without representation.

A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverised by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country had been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their new-found "freedom" - for which so many of their loved ones perished - comes pre-shackled by irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling. They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy.

bron

---

quote:

---

how the poor are financing the rich.

his short report outlines the role the US deficit has played in driving the process of globalisation. Secondly, it analyses the way in which poor countries are financing the US deficit and therefore the high living standards of US citizens. The following are our chief conclusions:

The US deficit as the real driving force behind globalisation

- The growing US deficit has, since the 1960s, been the dominant driving force behind financial globalisation. Elected representatives of the US and UK have actively promoted international financial liberalisation, or globalisation to finance the US deficit. Globalisation has not, we argue, been primarily driven by corporations or by developments in new technology.

- Today capital liberalisation is once again as in the 1920s and 30s leading to financial instability and growing international tensions. Above all financial liberalisation leads to the loss of policy autonomy by democratic as well as undemocratic governments.

- The exceptions are those highly indebted states dominant in the global economy, the United States and the United Kingdom whose indebtedness has not led to major economic adjustments nor to the loss of policy autonomy.

The US a heavily indebted country

- The accumulated external debt of the worlds richest country, the United States of America, is equal to $2.2 trillion. This is almost the exact amount owed by the whole of the developing world, including India, China and Brazil $2.5 trillion.

- In other words, three hundred million people in the US owe as much to the rest of the world, as do five billion people in all of the developing countries.

- Or to put it differently, every American citizen owes the rest of the world $7,333 while every citizen of all the developing countries only owes the rest of the world $500.

- Moreover, while developing country economies are bled dry through debt service repayments totalling more than $300bn per year, the US must only pay $20bn per year to service an almost equivalent amount of debt.

- Americans have been engaged in a consumer binge, which has led to the largest current account deficit in history, a staggering $445 billion or 4% of US GDP. This deficit has been increasing by 50% a year in recent years, and economists predict it will rise to $730bn by 2006.

- Given this daily defecit of up to £2bn, plus capital outflow of $2bn, the US in effect has to borrow $4bn from the pool of world savings every day.

How the US deficit is being financed by the poor of the world

- The US deficit is financed by a) the thifty savers of East Asia, in particular Japan, China and Singapore; but also b) by surpluses built up by countries like France and Switzerland.

- More disturbingly, the US deficit is being financed by the poor through a) capital flight from poor countries and b) the forced holdings of high levels of dollar reserves.

- To build up reserves, poor countries are borrowing hard currency from the US at interest rates as high as 18%; and lending this back to the US (in the form of interest on US Treasury Bonds) at 3%.

- Asian and African countries are forced, by the financial instability caused by globalisation, to maintain dollar reserves, at 14% and 7% of GDP respectively. The US in contrast holds only about 1.3% of her GDP in reserves.

- The cumulative cost for developing countries of holding such high dollar reserves may be as much as 24% of GDP over ten years; which represent a significant drag on growth rates.

- Inflows of capital into the US and UK: a) help to lower interest rates and therefore borrowing costs for the people of these countries and b) inflate the value of their currencies by about 20%. This enables rich countries, therefore, to purchase imports from the rest of the world 20% cheaper than they would otherwise have been able to.

- If it were not for capital flight, at least 25 African countries would be net creditors, not debtors.

- Countries like Argentina find that their governments are borrowing hard currency, only to find it promptly leaves the country (in the form of capital flight) for Wall St., London, Zurich or Madrid a legitimate process under capital liberalisation.

- However the poor in these countries are then saddled with huge public debts. Argentina's total external debt of $150 bn is almost exactly equal to unrecorded capital flight of $130bn.

The next crisis?

- The US deficit is not sustainable. The issue before us is the form that the necessary adjustment takes?

- While there is much debate about when or how this will happen, our report notes that it is inevitably the poor countries that will bear the highest costs of any correction to the US's unsustainable debts.

- Some countries will also lose substantial inflows of private capital.

- Countries that are dollarised, like Ecuador, will bear the brunt of high interest rates, as the US is forced to ratchet up rates to attract new capital.

- Other countries will pay in the form of declining terms of trade; those exporting commodities will be hit the hardest.

---