A World Safe For Capitalism

Download or read book A World Safe for Capitalism written by Cyrus Veeser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-14 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning book provides a unique window on how America began to intervene in world affairs. In exploring what might be called the prehistory of Dollar Diplomacy, Cyrus Veeser brings together developments in New York, Washington, Santo Domingo, Brussels, and London. Theodore Roosevelt plays a leading role in the story as do State Department officials, Caribbean rulers, Democratic party leaders, bankers, economists, international lawyers, sugar planters, and European bondholders, among others. The book recounts a little-known incident: the takeover by the Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC) of the foreign debt, national railroad, and national bank of the Dominican Republic. The inevitable conflict between private interest and public policy led President Roosevelt to launch a sweeping new policy that became known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The corollary gave the U. S. the right to intervene anywhere in Latin American that "wrongdoing or impotence" (in T. R.'s words) threatened "civilized society." The "wrongdoer" in this case was the SDIC. Imposing government control over corporations was launched and became a hallmark of domestic policy. By proposing an economic remedy to a political problem, the book anticipates policies embodied in the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

Download or read book Making the World Safe for Capitalism written by Christopher Doran and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iraq War defined the first decade of the twenty-first century – leading to mass protests and raising profound questions about domestic politics and the use of military force. Yet most explanations of the war have a narrow focus either on political personalities or oil. Christopher Doran provides a unique perspective, arguing that the drive to war came from the threat Iraq might pose to American economic hegemony if the UN sanctions regime was ended. Doran argues that this hegemony is rooted in third-world debt and corporate market access. It was protection of these arrangements that motivated US action, not Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction or a simplistic desire to seize its oil. This book will provide new insights on the war which still casts a shadow over global politics, and will have wide appeal to all those concerned about the Middle East, world peace, and global development.

Download or read book A World Safe for Capitalism written by Cyrus Veeser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A World Safe for Capitalism unravels a little-known incident: a Wall Street corporation's takeover of the foreign debt, national railroad, and national bank of the Dominican Republic in the 1890s. Working with the republic's tyrannical president, the American firm tried to turn self-sufficient peasants into cash-crop farmers, with disastrous results. By 1904, the company's narrow pursuit of profit clashed with Theodore Roosevelt's goal of making the United States a great power, thus triggering a sweeping new policy-the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Praised by Diplomatic History as "a model of globe-trotting multiarchival research," this exciting history covers events in New York, Washington, Santo Domingo, Brussels, and London.

Download or read book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things written by Raj Patel and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

Download or read book Saving Capitalism written by Robert B. Reich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date—a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make America so strong is now failing us, and what it will take to fix it. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of economics and politics than Robert B. Reich, and now he reveals how power and influence have created a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the “free market” is, and how it has masked the power of moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. Reich exposes the falsehoods that have been bolstered by the corruption of our democracy by huge corporations and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street: that all workers are paid what they’re “worth,” that a higher minimum wage equals fewer jobs, and that corporations must serve shareholders before employees. He shows that the critical choices ahead are not about the size of government but about who government is for: that we must choose not between a free market and “big” government but between a market organized for broadly based prosperity and one designed to deliver the most gains to the top. Ever the pragmatist, ever the optimist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity when we shore up the countervailing power of everyone else. Passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, Saving Capitalism is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.

Download or read book Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism gathers together decades of writing by Melvyn Leffler, one of the most respected historians of American foreign policy, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans’ understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? Leffler’s wide-ranging essays explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. He stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, he also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, Leffler’s work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities. An account of the development of U.S. national security policy by one of its most influential thinkers, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism includes a substantial new introduction from the author.

Download or read book State Capitalism written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the Cold War ushered in an age of American triumphalism best characterized by the "Washington Consensus:" the idea that free markets, democratic institutions, limitations on government involvement in the economy, and the rule of law were the foundations of prosperity and stability. The last fifteen years, starting with the Asian financial crisis, have seen the gradual erosion of that consensus. Many commentators have pointed to the emergence of a powerful new rival model: state capitalism. In state capitalist regimes, the government typically owns firms in strategic industries. Not beholden to private-sector shareholders, such firms are allowed to operate with razor-thin margins if the state deems them strategically important. China, soon to be the world's largest economy, is the best known state capitalist regime, but it is hardly the only one. In State Capitalism, Joshua Kurlantzick ranges across the world--China, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and more--and argues that the increase in state capitalism across the globe has, on balance, contributed to a decline in democracy. He isolates some of the reasons for state capitalism's resurgence: the fact that globalization favors economies of scale in the most critical industries, and the widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus in the face of the problems that have plagued the world economy in recent years. That said, a number of democratic nations have embraced state capitalism, and in those regimes, state-backed firms like Brazil's Embraer have enjoyed considerable success. Kurlantzick highlights the mixed record and the evolving nature of the model, yet he is more concerned about the negative effects of state capitalism. When states control firms, whether in democratic or authoritarian regimes, the government increases its advantage over the rest of society. The combination of new technologies, the perceived failures of liberal economics and democracy in many developing nations, the rise of modern kinds of authoritarians, and the success of some of the best-known state capitalists have created an era ripe for state intervention. State Capitalism offers the sharpest analysis yet of what state capitalism's emergence means for democratic politics around the world.