Boston Review - Noam Chomsky: Crisis and Hope - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 Dec 09
  

  Frederick John

  Boston Review Noam Chomsky neo-liberalism American History crisis economics

  • Washington adopted the standard operating procedures for such a case, moving at once to undermine the regime. A few months later came the anticipated military coup, and the resulting junta instituted a reign of terror, which was backed by Bush senior and even more fully by Clinton, despite pretenses. By 1994 Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated and sent U.S. forces to restore the elected president, but on the strict condition that he accept a harsh neoliberal regime.
  • no protection for the economy.
  • 98 more annotations...
  • • cannot compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on huge government subsidies, thanks largely to Reagan
    • a 1995 USAID report observed that the “export-driven trade and investment policy”—that Washington mandated—will “relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer.” Neoliberal policies dismantled what was left of economic sovereignty and drove the country into chaos, accelerated by Bush junior’s blocking of international aid
    • February 2004 the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, backed a military coup and spirited President Aristide off to Africa. Haiti had, by then, lost the capacity to feed itself,
    • food crisis
    • results from dedication to the basic principles of business-run state policy
    • The distribution of concerns illustrates another crisis, a cultural crisis: the tendency to focus on short-term parochial gains, a core element of our socioeconomic institutions and their ideological support system.
    • incentives devised for corporate managers to enrich themselves, however grievous the impact on others—for example, the “too big to fail” insurance policies provided by the unwitting public.
    • roots of the financial crisis, is the under-pricing of systemic risk: if you and I make a transaction, we factor in the cost to us, but not to others. The financial industry, that means Goldman Sachs, if managed properly, will calculate the potential cost to itself if a loan goes bad, but not the impact on the financial system, which can be severe.
    • John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, wrote Global Finance at Risk, an important book in which they spelled out the consequences of these market inefficiencies and outlined means to deal with them.
    • the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II.
    • Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, anticipated that its core principles
    • would lead to rapid and relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs that had very strong public support.

    • economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “golden age of capitalism.”

    • “golden age” saw not only unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures.
    • free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means.

    • Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.

    • Barry Eichengreen
    • the costs imposed by market inefficiencies and failures could be imposed on the public
    • became difficult when governments were “politicized” by “universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labor parties
    • radicalization of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war.
    • Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures.” There is a corollary: dismantling of the Bretton Woods restrictions on capital during the neoliberal period restores a powerful weapon against democracy.
    • The neoliberal rollback of democracy—often called “democracy promotion”—has enabled other means of control and marginalization of the public.
    • management of electoral extravaganzas in the United States by the public relations industry, peaking with Obama, who won the industry’s award for “marketer of the year for 2008.
    • The Financial Times paraphrased one marketing executive suggesting that the Obama triumph should “have more influence on boardrooms than any president since Ronald Reagan,
    • Reagan taught, “you had to give [your organization] a vision,” leading to the “reign of the imperial CEO” in the 1980s and 1990s.
    • The synergy of running corporations and controlling politics, including the marketing of candidates as commodities, offers great prospects for the future management of democracy.
    • One of the reasons for the radical difference in development between Latin America and East Asia in the last half century is that Latin America did not control capital flight
    • during South Korea’s remarkable growth period, capital flight was not only banned, but could bring the death penalty.
    • neoliberal rules have been observed since the ’70s, economic performance has generally deteriorated and social democratic programs have substantially weakened.
    • In the United States,
    • real wages for the majority have largely stagnated for 30 years, instead of tracking productivity growth as before, while work hours have increased,
    • have declined further
    • Benefits,
    • Social indicators—general measures of the health of the society
    • began to decline, falling to the 1960 level by the end of the millennium.
    • Economic growth found its way into few pockets, increasingly in the financial industries.
    • Finance constituted a few percentage points of GDP in 1970, and has since risen to well over one-third, while productive industry has declined, and with it, living standards for much of the workforce.
    • The economy has been punctuated by bubbles, financial crises, and public bailouts, currently reaching new highs.
    • it was highly beneficial to the narrow sectors of privilege and power that provide the “principal architects of policy.”
    • The phrase “golden age of capitalism” might itself be challenged. The period can more accurately be called “state capitalism.”
    • The state sector was, and remains, a primary factor in development and innovation through a variety of measures, among them research and development, procurement, subsidy, and bailouts.
    • policies operated mainly under a Pentagon cover as long as the cutting edge of the advanced economy was electronics-based. In recent years there has been a shift toward health-oriented state institutions as the cutting edge becomes more biology-based.
    • The crucial state role in economic development should be kept in mind when we hear dire warnings about government intervention in the financial system after private management has once again driven it to crisis, this time, an unusually severe crisis, and one that harms the rich, not just the poor, so it merits special concern.
    • Niall Ferguson in the New York Review of Books
    • “the lesson of economic history is very clear. Economic growth . . . comes from technological innovation and gains in productivity, and these things come from the private sector, not from the state”
    • “The Crisis”
    • On the contrary, the state has always been a central factor in economic development
    • American colonies were free to abandon the orthodox economic policies that dictated adherence to their comparative advantage in export of primary commodities while importing superior British manufacturing goods. Instead, the Hamiltonian economy imposed very high tariffs so that an industrial economy could develop: textiles, steel, and much else.
    • the United States as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism,”
    • Paul Bairoch
    • highest tariffs in the world during its great growth period. And protectionism is only one of the many forms of state intervention. Protectionist policies continued until the mid-twentieth century, when the United States was so far in the lead that the playing field was tilted in the proper direction—that is, to the advantage of U.S. corporations.
    • Bairoch concludes from a broad survey that “it is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory” as the doctrine that free markets were the engine of growth,
    • In earlier years the cotton-based economy of the industrial revolution relied on massive ethnic cleansing and slavery, rather severe forms of state intervention in the economy.
    • it emerged again after Reconstruction in a form that was in many ways more virulent, with what amounted to criminalization of African-American life and widespread use of convict labor, which continued until World War II.
    • The industrial revolution, from the late nineteenth century, relied heavily on this new form of slavery,
    • Wall Street Journal bureau chief Douglas Blackmon
    • post-World War II “golden age,” African Americans were able for the first time to enjoy some level of social and economic advancement, but the disgraceful post-Reconstruction history has been partially reconstituted during the neoliberal years with the rapid growth
    • “the prison-industrial complex,” a uniquely American crime committed continuously since the 1980s and exacerbated by the dismantling of productive industry.
    • American system of mass production
    • was largely created in military arsenals. Solving the major nineteenth-century management problem—railroads—was beyond the capacity of private capital, so the challenge was handed over to the army.
    • dramatic increase in the state role after World War II, particularly in the United States, where a good part of the advanced economy developed in this framework.
    • State-guided modes of economic development require considerable deceit in a society where the public cannot be controlled by force. People cannot be told that the advanced economy relies heavily on their risk-taking, while eventual profit is privatized,
    • Reacting immediately to the Wall’s fall, the Bush senior administration issued a new National Security Strategy
    • a collapse that took with it the whole framework of domestic population control.
    • Washington’s response was straightforward: everything will stay much the same, but with new pretexts.
    • need a huge military system, but for a new reason: the “technological sophistication” of Third World powers. We have to maintain the “defense industrial base,” a euphemism for state-supported high-tech industry. We must also maintain intervention forces directed at the Middle East’s energy-rich regions, where the threats to our interests that required military intervention “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to decades of pretense.
    • Robert Komer—the architect of President Carter’s Rapid Deployment Force (later Central Command), aimed primarily at the Middle East—testified before Congress in 1980 that the Force’s most likely use was not resisting Soviet attack, but dealing with indigenous and regional unrest, in particular the “radical nationalism”
    • “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. These plans open a new phase of Western imperial domination—more politely called “bringing stability” and “peace.”
    • November 2007, the White House announced plans for a long-term military presence in Iraq and a policy of “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.”
    • In Afpak Obama is building enormous new embassies and other facilities, on the model of the city-within-a-city in Baghdad.
    • These new installations in Iraq and Afpak are like no embassies in the world, just as the United States is alone in its vast military-basing system and control of the air, sea, and space for military purposes.

    • Obama-Petraeus-McChrystal policies as a fundamental “strategic error,” which may lead to “the collapse of the Pakistani state,” a calamity that would “dwarf” other current crises.

    • it is worth noting that the more sophisticated are aware of the deceit that is employed as a device to control the public, and regard it as praiseworthy.
    • Samuel Huntington,
    • “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.” An important lesson for those who want power to devolve to the public, a critical battle that is fought daily.
    • There is a striking gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of major issues, domestic and foreign, and public opinion is often more sane, at least in my judgment.
    • It also tends to be fairly consistent over time, despite the fact that public concerns and aspirations are marginalized or ridiculed—one very significant feature of the yawning “democratic deficit,” the failure of formal democratic institutions to function properly.
    • American republic was founded on the principle that there should be a democratic deficit.
    • James Madison, the main framer of the Constitutional order, held that power should be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men,” who have sympathy for property owners and their rights. Possibly with Shay’s Rebellion in mind, he was concerned that “the equal laws of suffrage” might shift power into the hands of those who might seek agrarian reform, an intolerable attack on property rights. He feared that “symptoms of a levelling spirit” had appeared sufficiently “in certain quarters to give warning of the future danger.”
    • Gordon Wood summarizes the thoughts of the founders: “The Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period,” delivering power to a “better sort” of people and excluding “those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power.”
    • In Madison’s defense, his picture of the world was pre-capitalist: he thought that power would be held by the “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher,” men who are “pure and noble,” a “chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice would be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations,”
    • By World War I, business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the population had won so many rights that they could not be controlled by force, so it would be necessary to turn to control of attitudes and opinions. Those are the years when the huge public relations industry emerged
    • The industry was devoted to what Walter Lippmann approvingly called “a new art in the practice of democracy,” the “manufacture of consent”—the “engineering of consent” in the phrase of his contemporary Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the public relations industry
    • The same techniques, it was hoped, would ensure that the “intelligent minorities” would rule, undisturbed by “the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,” the general public, “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “spectators,” not “participants.”
    • the financial crisis—it will presumably be patched up somehow, while leaving the institutions that created it pretty much in place. Recently the Treasury Department permitted early TARP repayments, which reduce bank capacity to lend, as was immediately pointed out, but allow the banks to pour money into the pockets of the few who matter.
    • their lives—and pay—would improve, even if the broader economy did not.”
    • The chair of the prominent law firm Sullivan & Cromwell offered the equally apt prediction that “Wall Street, after getting billions of taxpayer dollars, will emerge from the financial crisis looking much the same as before markets collapsed.”
    • “Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here,”
    • “the government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.”
    • The state-corporate programs, which included massive projects of suburbanization along with destruction and then gentrification of inner cities, began with a conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy efficient electric public transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities; they were convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a slap on the wrist.
    • The federal government then took over, relocating infrastructure and capital stock to suburban areas and creating the massive interstate highway system, under the usual pretext of “defense.” Railroads were displaced by government-financed motor and air transport.
    • The public played almost no role, apart from choice within the narrowly structured framework of options designed by state-corporate managers. One result is atomization of society and entrapment of isolated individuals with self-destructive ambitions and crushing debt. These efforts to “fabricate consumers”
    • direct people “to the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption”

    • emerged from the recognition a century ago of the need to curtail democratic achievements and to ensure that the “opulent minority” are protected from the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.”

    • While state-corporate power was vigorously promoting privatization of life and maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices that the market does not provide—another destructive built-in market inefficiency.
    • At the same time, Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of U.S. industry, ruining the lives of the workforce and communities. It is difficult to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic system that has been constructed by state-corporate managers.
    • Surely the auto industry could be reconstructed to produce what the country needs, using its highly skilled workforce—and what the world needs, and soon, if we are to have some hope of averting major catastrophe. It has been done before, after all.
    • The state-corporate leadership has other commitments, but there is no reason for passivity on the part of the “stakeholders”—workers and communities.
• 14 Dec 09
  

  Cappella Adelante

  Since 1975, an award-winning forum for political, cultural and literary ideas.

• 16 Oct 09
  

  Gerhard Stoltz
  • Industry executives exulted in the business press that Obama was the highest achievement yet of those who “helped pioneer the packaging of candidates as consumer brands 30 years ago,”
• 11 Sep 09
  

  Jerry Monaco
  • For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently. For example, in the October 26, 2008 edition of the Bangladeshi newspaper The New Nation, we read:
  • For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently. For example, in the October 26, 2008 edition of the Bangladeshi newspaper The New Nation, we read:
  • 29 more annotations...
  • • For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently. For example, in the October 26, 2008 edition of the Bangladeshi newspaper The New Nation, we read:
    • As the fate of Bangladesh illustrates, the terrible food crisis is not just a result of “lack of true concern” in the centers of wealth and power. In large part it results from very definite concerns of global managers: for their own welfare. It is always well to keep in mind Adam Smith’s astute observation about policy formation in England. He recognized that the “principal architects” of policy—in his day the “merchants and manufacturers”—made sure that their own interests had “been most peculiarly attended to” however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England and, far more so, those who were subjected to “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” particularly in conquered India, Smith’s own prime concern in the domains of European conquest.
    • One way to enter this morass is offered by the June 11 issue of the New York Review of Books. The front-cover headline reads “How to Deal With the Crisis”; the issue features a symposium of specialists on how to do so. It is very much worth reading, but with attention to the definite article. For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance
    • For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently. For example, in the October 26, 2008 edition of the Bangladeshi newspaper The New Nation, we read:
    • It’s very telling that trillions have already been spent to patch up leading world financial institutions, while out of the comparatively small sum of $12.3 billion pledged in Rome earlier this year, to offset the food crisis, only $1 billion has been delivered. The hope that at least extreme poverty can be eradicated by the end of 2015, as stipulated in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, seems as unrealistic as ever, not due to lack of resources but a lack of true concern for the world’s poor.
    • It’s very telling that trillions have already been spent to patch up leading world financial institutions, while out of the comparatively small sum of $12.3 billion pledged in Rome earlier this year, to offset the food crisis, only $1 billion has been delivered. The hope that at least extreme poverty can be eradicated by the end of 2015, as stipulated in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, seems as unrealistic as ever, not due to lack of resources but a lack of true concern for the world’s poor.
    • The food crisis erupted first and most dramatically in Haiti in early 2008. Like Bangladesh, Haiti today is a symbol of misery and despair. And, like Bangladesh, when European explorers arrived, the island was remarkably rich in resources, with a large and flourishing population. It later became the source of much of France’s wealth. I will not run through the sordid history, but the current food crisis can be traced directly to 1915, Woodrow Wilson’s invasion: murderous, brutal, and destructive. Among Wilson’s many crimes was dissolving the Haitian Parliament at gunpoint because it refused to pass “progressive legislation” that would have allowed U.S. businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson’s Marines then ran a free election, in which the legislation was passed by 99.9 percent of the 5 percent of the public permitted to vote. All of this comes down through history as “Wilsonian idealism.”
    • Later, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) instituted programs to turn Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean,” by adhering to the sacred principle of comparative advantage:
    • Haiti must import food and other commodities from the United States, while working people, mostly women, toil under miserable conditions in U.S.-owned assembly plants.
    • ohn Eatwell and Lance Taylor, wrote Global Finance at Risk, an important book in which they spelled out the consequences of these market inefficiencies and outlined means to deal with them. Their proposals conflicted sharply with the deregulatory rage that was then consuming the Clinton administration, under the leadership of those whom Obama has now called upon to put band-aids on the disaster they helped to create.
    • In substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II
    • unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures. As Keynes and White were aware, free capital movement and speculation inhibit those options. To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means.
    • Accordingly, in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures.” There is a corollary: dismantling of the Bretton Woods restrictions on capital during the neoliberal period restores a powerful weapon against democracy.
    • means of control and marginalization of the public.
    • Industry executives exulted in the business press that Obama was the highest achievement yet of those who “helped pioneer the packaging of candidates as consumer brands 30 years ago,”
    • The synergy of running corporations and controlling politics, including the marketing of candidates as commodities, offers great prospects for the future management of democracy.
    • One of the reasons for the radical difference in development between Latin America and East Asia in the last half century is that Latin America did not control capital flight, which often approached the level of its crushing debt and has regularly been wielded as a weapon against the threat of democracy and social reform.
    • In contrast, during South Korea’s remarkable growth period, capital flight was not only banned, but could bring the death penalty.
    • Where neoliberal rules have been observed since the ’70s, economic performance has generally deteriorated and social democratic programs have substantially weakened. In the United States, which partially accepted these rules, real wages for the majority have largely stagnated for 30 years, instead of tracking productivity growth as before, while work hours have increased, now well beyond those of Europe. Benefits, which always lagged, have declined further.
    • Finance constituted a few percentage points of GDP in 1970, and has since risen to well over one-third, while productive industry has declined, and with it, living standards for much of the workforce. The economy has been punctuated by bubbles, financial crises, and public bailouts, currently reaching new highs. A few outstanding international economists explained and predicted these results from the start. But mythology about “efficient markets” and “rational choice” prevailed. This is no surprise: it was highly beneficial to the narrow sectors of privilege and power that provide the “principal architects of policy.”
    • The phrase “golden age of capitalism” might itself be challenged. The period can more accurately be called “state capitalism.” The state sector was, and remains, a primary factor in development and innovation through a variety of measures, among them research and development, procurement, subsidy, and bailouts.
    • The crucial state role in economic development should be kept in mind when we hear dire warnings about government intervention in the financial system after private management has once again driven it to crisis, this time, an unusually severe crisis, and one that harms the rich, not just the poor, so it merits special concern.
    • remarks that were probably written on a computer and sent via the Internet, which were substantially in the state sector for decades before they became available for private profit.
    • Large-scale state intervention in the economy is not just a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, either. On the contrary, the state has always been a central factor in economic development. Once they gained their independence, the American colonies were free to abandon the orthodox economic policies that dictated adherence to their comparative advantage in export of primary commodities while importing superior British manufacturing goods. Instead, the Hamiltonian economy imposed very high tariffs so that an industrial economy could develop: textiles, steel, and much else. The eminent economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the United States as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism,” with the highest tariffs in the world during its great growth period
    • among other measures to rescue incompetent U.S. corporate management
    • while orthodox policies were rammed down the throats of the colonies
    • Selective application of economic prinicples—orthodox economics forced on the colonies while violated at will by those free to do so—is a basic factor in the creation of the sharp North-South divide.
    • “it is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory” as the doctrine that free markets were the engine of growth
    • In earlier years the cotton-based economy of the industrial revolution relied on massive ethnic cleansing and slavery, rather severe forms of state intervention in the economy. Though theoretically slavery was ended with the Civil War, it emerged again after Reconstruction in a form that was in many ways more virulent, with what amounted to criminalization of African-American life and widespread use of convict labor, which continued until World War II. T
• 09 Sep 09
  

  Rajan Datta

  Chomsky critique of the political system

  2009 history politics economics philosophy

• 08 Sep 09
  

  Rick L

  democracy elites politics imperialism activism inequality crisis

  • If I want to get home from work, the market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota, but not between a car and a subway. That is a social decision.
  • Of all of the crises that afflict us, the growing democratic deficit may be the most severe.
• 

  T. Rex Bean

  chomsky

• 

  Cochin Blogger

  politics

• 06 Sep 09
  

  Samuel Mann

  the question is military spending or improvement (computers, sustainability etc). People would choose the latter options to improve lives, but they had no choice - the government chose for them (military), and hence "democratic deficit".

  • if Americans a half century ago had been given the choice of directing their tax money to Pentagon programs to enable their grandchildren to have computers, iPods, the Internet, and so on, or putting it into developing a livable and sustainable socioeconomic order, they might have made the latter choice. But they had no choice. That is standard. There is a striking gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of major issues, domestic and foreign, and public opinion is often more sane, at least in my judgment. It also tends to be fairly consistent over time, despite the fact that public concerns and aspirations are marginalized or ridiculed—one very significant feature of the yawning “democratic deficit,” the failure of formal democratic institutions to function properly.
• 04 Sep 09
  

  Mark Rabnett

  Bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation.

  economy Chomsky globalization colonialism capitalism food politics for:@twitter

• 03 Sep 09
  

  B T

  chomsky interesting

• 

  Doug Noon

  Bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation....In substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. The architects of Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, anticipated that its core principles—including capital controls and regulated currencies—would lead to rapid and relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs that had very strong public support. Mostly, they were vindicated on both counts. Many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “golden age of capitalism.”

  Noam_Chomsky

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