Book recommendation

Finally finished Antonia Juhasz's The Bush Agenda, not because it was a difficult or unpleasant read, but rather because I've been spending far too much of my free time reading my favorite political blogs recently. The book is pretty good, and looks at the connection between corrporate globalization, multilateral trade agreements between rich and poor countries and military imperialism/intervention and how in many ways they are mututally reinforcing flip sides of the same coins. A large part of the book is devoted to analyzing Iraq as a case study in how US imperial ambitions, manifested by a war and ongoing military occupation, are greatly benefitting a handful of large, politically connected multinational corporations primarily at the expense of US taxpayers and the people of Iraq.

Particularly valuable is the last chapter, in which she offers up some alternatives to what she identifies as the "Bush Agenda" (basically neoliberal economic policies being pursued in conjuntion with military intervention). Some of her suggestions, such as pushing for cancellation of all Third World multilaternal debt obligations, are quite good. Others, such as changing US corporate law to make investors "liable for harms done by the companies in which the invest" I disagree with, primarily because public employee pension funds, which many rely upon for their retirements, are so heavily invested in major corporations. I understand her point about wanting to force investors to consider a corporation's human rights, labor and environmental practices as well as its quarterly earnings, but I would rather see the company's directors held financially/legally liable rather than a retiring schoolteacher or subway conductor.

She calls out "free trade" agreements such as the proposed MEFTA (Middle East Free Trade Agreement) for what they are: one-sided tools to allow wealthy nations' large corporations to have increased market freedom to operate at higher degrees of profitability in the poorer target country, while weakening the target countries' worker protections and domestic industries' protective tariffs and subsidies. Needless to say, she also documents quite effectively how miserably the World Bank and IMF's neoliberal economic policies, like requiring target countries to accept liberalization and privatization as well as other so-called "Structural Adjustments" as a necessary condition of receiving loans, conditions that have worsened many of these recipient countries,

One of the most important points she makes is how big of a waste the huge reconstruction contracts handed out to Bechtel and Halliburton are for US tax payers. I didn't realize quite how large a sum of money these contracts represent--about $30 billion in taxpayer money--or how ridiculously inflated the price tags are considering the often shoddy quality of work delivered.

I agree with Juhasz's assessement that the US is morally responsible to help fund the post-Hussein reconstruction of Iraq, and that it is wholly appropriate for Iraq's new government to seek out technical assistance from Western nations in designing new educational systems, new economic policies, etc. But it is wholly inappropriate that the US is "paying" for the reconstruction by handing out billion dollar contracts to politically connected US corporations to do the work rather than fully capable Iraqi firms, as well as pressing the new government to accede to economic policies that favor the rights and guarantee the profits of multinational corporations rather the Iraqi citizens.

Overall, well-worth the time to read it, although I do wish she had spent a little more time exploring the connection between advancing the corporate globalization agenda and US military imperialism in other regions of the world--for example Latin America