David Rothkopf's Superclass, Ha-joon Changs's Bad Samaritans, and Mark Engler's How to Rule the World

...Where Rothkopf claims that the nation­state has become irrelevant, Chang argues that it is as important as ever and largely ignores the role of the individuals profiled in Super­class...

...The Fund's loan portfolio-at $105 billion in 2003-is around $17 billion today, with most of this owed by two governments, one of which (Turkey) indi­cated in March of 2008 that future loans are "unlikely...

...But few developed countries honored these in their past, and the free-market Economist once opposed patents on the basis that the costs to blocking wide­spread (and costless) diffusion of knowledge would outweigh the benefits . Access to copy­righted technology and academic textbooks could boost poor countries' productivity and growth, while life-saving medicines are the sine qua non of rebuilding AIDS-ravaged countries . But thanks to the WTO intellectual-property agreement, developing countries are now pay­ing an extra $45 billion annually in technology license payments alone-or about half what rich governments spend on foreign aid . The neoliberal world order is full of instances of what Chang (per Gore Vidai) terms socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor...

...In his lifetime, and in less than a quarter of the time it took the United Kingdom to develop, per-capita in­come in his native South Korea has gone from below Ghana's to OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) lev­els . The country did this with an extensive mix of government regulations on imports and for­eign direct investment coupled with a vigorous export orientation...

...While WTO proponents often claim to push "free trade," such pacts in fact require massive government intervention in free markets to pro­tect monopoly patents...

...Pushed by popular move­ments, Latin American governments have trended left, creating alternative development financing mechanisms and thwarting Bush's push for a Free Trade Area of the Americas . Today, IMF economists are being downsized and face the poetic justice of return­ing to home governments that can no longer hire them, thanks to the privatization and fis­cal austerity measures they themselves forced through lending conditions...

...And since 2001, there have been large and well-funded groups-some headed by fa­mous Irish rock stars-that ask for little more than small-bore changes to multilateral insti­tutions . While Engler acknowledges the demand for progressives to spell out their alternative vi­sions, he's also willing to make the case for just saying "no ." After all, "the alternative to invad­ing Iraq is not invading Iraq . The alternative to CAFTA is no CAFTA...

...Corporate boards fret about the fallout from increased inequality...

...Bad Samaritans, on the other hand, allows that some rich governments and donors-or at least certain people in their em­ploy-may have good intentions, but that they wí11 end up hurting more than helping if they don't learn the right lessons from history...

...attend the same schools ; interact in the same boardrooms, on the same ski slopes and private jets...

...Superclass fails to engage seriously with the critiques ofneoliberalopponents...

...When Chang asserts, "Brazil is far too smart and independent-minded" to sign up for most neoliberal policies, who is "Brazil...

...The countries most restrictive of foreign invest­ment-from nineteenth-century America to twenty-first-century China-have attracted the lion's share of it...

...Not in thrust or ultimate goal, but in emphasis...

...Chang holds out hope that enlightened self­interest will make developed-country govern­ments-tired of the moribund third-world export markets that neoliberalism's low­growth record has yielded-see the error of their ways . But when it comes to plotting out how this might actually happen, Chang, like Rothkopf, declines to address the col­lective-action problem...

...Engler cautions against seeing these con­trasts as a vindication of Clinton, whose multilateralism was selective and put U .S . cor­porate interests first...

...Acting alone, or even together, national governments wí11 not be able to rein in the superclass or even de­liver on their own social contract...

...And the World So­cial Forum process continues to attract hun­dreds of thousands of participants from Porto Alegre, Brazil, to Atlanta, Georgia...

...In2005, European groups almost derailed the debt-can­cellation initiative by insisting that donors com­pensate the World Bank for any lost revenue...

...WTO expansion has been stopped in its tracks, and international finan­cial institutions are a shell of their former self, but this has been primarily the doing of na­tion-states . Spurred by fallout from financial crises of the 1990s, Asian governments stock­piled currency reserves and became less reli­ l l 2 . DISSENT I Winter 2009 ant onIMFbailouts...

...Aside from making in­coherent arguments-he argues that trade benefits everyone, except those that it doesn't­such apologetics ignore existing bodies of knowledge . Economists have known since the 1940s that the main impact of trade liberal­ization for a developed nation like the United States would be wage stagnation for labor as a whole, not just narrow job loss in import-com­peting industries...

...This coalition is already pushing bills like the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act-co-sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Representative Mike Michaud (D-Maine) and eighty others-that will overhaul NAFTA and other trade policies . Nevertheless, as economic conditions worsen, there wí11 be a bevy of rich individuals and governments attempting to claim the reform mantle as their own . The WTO, IMF, and World Bank are already attempting to reposition themselves as the ideal brokers for solutions to the climate, finance, and food-price crises-despite their role in creating or exacerbating them . Decades of political marginalization have left too many progressives too timid to lay out their alternative visions in a meaningful policy form . If they fail to do so now, the current "told you so" moment will be sweet but short . DISSENT I Winter 2009 . 1 13...

...If firms have become so mobile as to make national regulation powerless, why are the Bad Samaritan rich countries so keen on making developing countries sign up to all those international agreements that restrict their ability to regulate foreign investment...

...While Clinton charmed the global cultural intelligentsia with his knowl­edge of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez, Bush drove global approval ratings of the U .S . presidency through the floor...

...empire wracked by trade deficits and military overextension, Bush might have hit the accelerator, but didn't set the direction . Unlike Rothkopf or Chang, Engler ac­knowledges the global-justice movement's role in prompting a wider mainstream discussion on inequality and development . And far from disappearing, as the conventional wisdom goes, global-justice actors have moved into different spaces beyond street protests . Fair traders mo­bilized a nearly three-year, cross-border cam­paign that culminated in the opposition of more than 90 percent of congressional Democrats to the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA...

...In the current round of WTO talks, however, rich nations are asking their poor counterparts to reduce industrial tariffs to levels not seen since colonial days-some­thing that would hinder infant-industry promoDISSENT I Winter 2009 . l l l tion, not to mention drain a primary source of government revenue and thus social spending...

...But Engler also highlights political devel­opments for which the movement cannot claim primary credit...

...Or that turns the U.S...

...Debt-relief groups found strange bedfellows in the Bush administration, which joined the other G-8 governments in cancel­ing 100 percent of eligible debt from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries...

...Indeed, Rothkopf discards history and adopts a metaphysical approach . Elites speak English...

...F SUPERCLASS is about elites and Bad Sa­ maritans about states, How to Rule the World is about the responses of social movements to both...

...But where Faux shows how the elites use their power to create agreements (NAFTA, for example) that reflect their interests, Rothkopf doesn't seem to make the connection between power and interest or, for that matter, even argue that different classes and segments of society have different inter­ests...

...For instance, social democrats like Faux are grouped in with conservative reactionaries like Iranian presi­dent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . This allows Rothkopf to sidestep progressive reformers' cri­tiques of NAFTA...

...But because he's unwilling to fess up to the full scale of the mess he helped create, his calls for increased dialogue or com­pensation ring hollow...

...In 2007, the Democratic congressional lead­ership cut a deal with the Bush administration on a Peru trade pact that included labor rights language but left the underlyingNAFTAmodel intact...

...But who exactly is the historical subject that develops poor countries...

...They disagree, for in­stance, on what exactly is the best thing about Davos's World Economic Forum...

...He has to dig fairly deeply into the right-wing fringe to find evidence that anyone actually holds this view only to then discard it by pointing out that elites do not necessarily agree on everything...

...Instead, he dwells on straw­man arguments such as the accusation that the superclass represents a global freemasonic con­spiracy...

...In­deed, as the number of people protesting the global institutions has shrunk since Septem­ber 11, 2001, the mainstream acceptance of their basic critiques has swelled...

...Much of the bookjour­nalist Mark Engler's first-analyzes how activ­ists have come to view the schism in the U .S . ruling class as one between Clintonite corpo­rate globalizers and Bushite imperial globalizers...

...And the power of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other neoliberal institutions has been fro­zen in place or, in some cases, scaled back . Three recent books-one from a corporate consultant, one from a Cambridge economist, and one from an activist-journalist-provide new evidence of the growing influence of the global-justice critique and show the challenges it wí11 face in the global meltdown era . oAN ROBINSON once said that JosephJSchumpeter was Karl Marx with the adjec­tives changed...

...Chang finds evidence of double standards in the intellectual-property debate as well...

...Even our military is too influenced by private inter­ests...

...The thesis is essentially the same: power and wealth are being concentrated in the hands of a small band of elites who have little to no loyalty to their home countries...

...Rothkopf claims that the superclass is dis­tinct in that its members often have tenuous ties to place or government, as a quote from corporate chair Craig Barrett indicates : "Intel can thrive today and never hire another Amen­can...

...or when columnist Thomas Friedman tells Rothkopf that members of Congress don't have "anywhere near the grasp that you or the average multinational CEO does today about how the world works [so] it's only natural that the business community steps ín ." As if for em­phasis, Rothkopf tells us that "the era of the nation state . . . has ended...

...David Rothkopf's latest book, Superclass, could be compared in a simi­lar fashion to Jeff Faux's bookThe Global Class War...

...Freer trade, l l o . DISSENT I Winter 2009 which benefits everyone, has been threatened by the fact that those who advocated it were not sensitive enough to the dislocations that it causes," he writes . "And I have been, as were my colleagues and counterparts elsewhere in the world, wrong...

...and from this a (mostly) com­mon agenda spontaneously emerges...

...He admits that too little concern has been paid to democracy...

...His faith in the grassroots is palpable : "A shift toward greater diversity and experimen­tation in the global economy will increase the power of social movements at the national level to pressure their leaders," he predicts . But at its core, How to Rule is less the strategy blue­print promised by the title than an inventory overreach into their climate and consumer-protection policies, and Americans wí11 soon join this discontent if and when we ever start getting any progressive policies in these areas . In addition, the leading global-justice groups have spent years preparing the political ground for the post-Bush era . World Bank campaigners have moved past simple debt reliefwhich has had some successes but often comes with additional harmful conditionalitiesand received congressional buy-in for mandated limitations on the latter...

...Federal can­didates call for a greening and localization of the economy...

...During the "Golden Age" of development in the decades following the Second World War, global trading rules were premised on of­fering developing countries special and differ­ential treatment...

...in the long, slow decline of a U.S...

...Bad Samaritans also takes on the notion that the state can't run efficient enterprises (Volkswagen and Singapore Airlines are counterexamples), that it can't develop the economy in the midst of corruption (Suharto's Indonesia and spoils-system America), and that it can't change cultural norms (Japan's instillation of a capitalist work ethic in its feu­dal peasantry a century ago) . The common denominator is a focus on state actors, un­like Rothkopf's almost exclusive take on in­dividuals...

...At base, arguments about globalization are about rules . Neoliberalism imposes a "golden straitjacket" (that is, allegedly pro-growth ends delivered via undemocratic means such as IMF condition­ality)-an evocative concept of Thomas Friedman's cited in all three books . Freed from this odious restraint, countries can function freely and outside the sanitarium . There is some conceptual lifting here, such as Engler's sustained critique of overly simplis­tic war-profiteering explanations for Operation Iraqi Freedom or his criticisms of Joseph Stiglitz's reluctance to criticize his former em­ployer, the World Bank, with the same vigor as he does the IMF...

...And voting blocs like the House Trade Working Group and their allies outside Congress-which already flexed their muscle by getting a majority of Democrats to vote against their leadership on the Peru deal-are a force with which to be reckoned...

...Indeed, the concentration of power and resources is natural, unavoidable-even desirable . "We wí11 always want and need leaders," he writes . Rothkopf is a corporate consultant and former Clinton administration trade official who had a hand in the deregulation of the 1990s...

...For instance, he criticizes fellow elites who ignore rising inequality...

...While BillClintonruled the world through proxies like the IMF, George W Bush sidelined the multilateral institutions in favor of direct intervention...

...Opinion polls show that majorities of voters are against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) regardless of age, party affiliation, or any other demographic indicator...

...His 2002 book Kicking Away the Ladder painted rich countries as hypocrites who used institutions like the WTO and IMF to restrict or prohibit the very developmentalist policies that were the secret of their success...

...For that reason, his admissions of the shortcomings of neoliberalism carry significant weight...

...government into a global fair dealer...

...Unfortunately, he misses too many oppor­tunities to connect the dots...

...The peninsula was not alone in its development approach : every now-devel­oped country from the United States to Fin­land did the same . Bad Samaritans is Changs retelling, for a non-specialist audience, of the conclusions of past, more academic, work...

...AMBRIDGE ECONOMIST Ha-Joon ChangChas made it his mission to set the his­ torical record straight...

...The "Told You So" Moment Todd Tucker SUPERCLASS by David Rothkopf Farrar, Strauss and Giroui, 2008 376 pp $26 BAD SAMARITANS by HaJoon Chang Bloomsbury Press, 2008 276 pp $26 .95 How TO RULE THE WORLD by Mark Engler Nation Books, 2008 362 pp $16.95 THIS OCTOBER, the International Mon­etary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings came to Washington, and, as they do every year, an impassioned bunch of activists mounted protests, decrying the neoliberal agenda that has deregulated mar­kets, pitted worker against worker, and devas­tated local communities and the environment . The difference this time around was that, in the wake of the most significant financial meltdown of our times, the bankers were echo­ing the protestors' calls for re-regulation...

...But Engler is more interested in hinting at potential future directions for ac­tivism, rather than offering an exposition of an alternative set of rules for the economy as Chang does . In fact, he criticizes intellectuals who have tried to swoop in and offer some reso­lution to "the question of vision" from on high, rather than engaging in democratic delibera­tions at the bottom . T HE CLOSEST Engler gets to prescription is when he concludes that progressives should divide and conquer the neoliberals, chasing them out of the major cen­ter-left parties (as he hopes wí11 happen in the United States) and even driving them out of state power where possible (as did happen in Bolivia...

...The movement has also been beset by stra­tegic disagreements in the Bush years...