Madam, - In reviewing my book America Rules: US Foreign Policy, Globalization and Corporate USA (Weekend Review, May 17th), Paul Gillespie makes a number of erroneous presumptions.
He describes me as an Irish member of "the new European left". I claim no such membership or ideological conformity. In summarising my views, and those of four other authors, he claims that none of us is anti-globalisation. "On the contrary", he writes, "each author is anxious to stress his internationalism and, in varying degrees, globalisation's liberating potential if it is organised differently to meet basic human needs". This statement distorts my attitude.
In the book I explain how globalisation represents the Americanisation and corporatisation of the world order, placing "the rights of multinational corporations above the rights of entire populations and outside the compass of democratic control and accountability". I show that this grossly inequitable new world order is the culmination of over a half-century of interventionist American foreign policy aimed at securing and expanding the global dominance of the United States and of Corporate USA.
The book highlights the control exercised by Corporate USA over the three (executive, legislative and judicial) branches of the US federal government and also in the world's other most important centres of political, economic and military power - the organs of the EU, the UN, NATO, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Within this new world order the power of sovereign governments and their electorates is being emasculated. Democracy is being jettisoned. The rights and needs of people are being ignored. Meanwhile, control over the planet's trade, food, wealth and resources is being concentrated in the boardrooms of the world's largest corporations. Within such an inequitable world order, I do not believe, as Paul Gillespie suggests, that there is any significant "liberating potential" for the world's poor. I do not believe that globalisation can be reformed to meet basic human needs. Rather, I believe that the US and corporate-dominated new world order must be overturned.
The reality of the new world order was accurately described by President George H. Bush as a world where "what we say goes". Can such a world order be reformed or is it likely that the US would tolerate meaningful reforms? I don't think so. - Yours, etc.,
TOM HANAHOE,
Ballina,
Co Mayo.