USA, if you are not the policeman of the world, why should we hold so mindboggling many of your “In God We Trust” dollars?

My father, arriving as a polish prisoner on the first train to Auschwitz on June 14 1940, number 245, was liberated by the Americans from Buchenwald, April 14, 1945. So I might certainly be biased, in favor of the United States acting as the policeman for the world. At least biased in favor of the United States I believe existed, and still hope and pray for that exists. (So I guess I just confessed that I might not be the so "radical of the middle" on all issues.)

And that is why I keep on warning about that if the United States reneges on being the policeman for the world, or becomes ashamed of its strength, then the world might renege on trusting the US to such an extent as to hold a mind-boggling amount of its dollars, backed by a "In God We Trust". Approximately China holds $1.3 trillion, Japan $1.1 trillion and the rest of the world $3.1 trillion. And so you see, there might be quite a lot of subconscious quid pro quo involved here.

PS. Obama ended his September 10 speech saying “America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”

And frankly, to act only when only “modest effort and risk” is required, is not what has made America so great, at least not in the eyes of this small human being, who much owes his existence to the huge and brave sacrifices of America.

PS. It is also absolutely clear that Putin, when ending his Op-ed in the New York with “we must not forget that God created us all equal”, after referring to “big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy”, has exclusively those who are governing the countries mind, those who so often shamelessly hide behind the skirts of sovereignty; and not for a second, not even remotely, is Putin thinking about the citizens who are governed, those who were the prime concern of America's founders.

And so, if "America is not the world’s policeman"...should Europe declare a state of emergency?

And please, if as a policeman, one one occasion, for your own reasons, want or need to restrict the punishment to something symbolic, is not that it is only symbolic, sort of the last thing you would want to say? 

And this is not the first time I have raised the issue of the dollar and America's military strength... and will to exercise it. Here in a letter in Washington Post

http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2013/01/handcuffed-by-triple-rating.html

Oh, and just in case. I am not talking about a war against Syria, but a war against the use of chemical weapons.

And to fight and punish the use of banned chemical weapons, requires a willing, and, hopefully a strong, firm and good policeman, with a great sense of justice.

Or, are we telling our mostly dead grandfathers, their Geneva Protocol prohibiting chemical weapons was pure nonsense? Do we now want it repealed? I pray not.

And America, please do not confuse war with servicing as a police. A police detains when there are infractions… he does not build nations.

And if the United States is not willing to be the policeman of the world, to help enforce laws they have also agreed with, would the world have to pray for some vigilantes to do that?

Surely all human rights criminals who hide behind the skirts of sovereignty, must be celebrating the USA not wanting to be the policeman of the world! 

And in reference to the case of Syria, below I quote from “Questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask” by Max Fisher, The Washington Post, September 1, 2013 "What’s the big deal with chemical weapons?" 

"War is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.

So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles."

Lost in the water of globalization

I have just returned from a trip to Central America (October 2000) during which I noted that an important issue in the debate on how to improve public services like water and power was the awarding of concessions to international water companies. I thought at that moment, not without some sadness, how some cultures that hundreds of years ago were expert at building and managing their aqueducts have today simply given up even trying.

Having three daughters of different ages, I have several times had to watch a movie aimed at adolescents called Clueless (in fact, it’s a great movie, and I might be using my daughters just as an excuse). In this movie a young girl tries to pass the exam for her driver’s license. After being severely reprimanded by her instructor for not knowing how to park her vehicle, she curtly answers back with the excuse that valet parking could be had everywhere. I feel that today many of us react in the same way to the difficulty of improving our public services and making them more efficient: “why try so hard when foreign investors can do it?” 

Evidently it is very often necessary to invest a considerable amount of resources or advanced technological know-how in order to offer an efficient and economically viable public service to the end user. In these cases a country may not have any alternative but to call on international investors and offer them a deal. However, in those cases where the only thing that is required to make a project go forward is good administration and a sound strategy for creating and maintaining relationships with users, specifically addressing issues such as quality and tariffs, it is difficult to condone the lack of desire to find a local solution to a local problem. One asks simply where we stand on our ambitions as a nation. 

You may ask what, for example, the administration of water systems or the distribution of power has to so with being a nation. The answer is probably “directly—nothing.” However, building a nation is not easy and requires at a minimum that its society learn how to resolve certain problems on its own. Taking the easy way out and simply calling in foreign assistance in order to solve problems in the water or power sectors could be compared to parents doing their child’s homework to insure a good grade while at the same time not allowing the child to learn how to do thing on his or her own.

Much of the pressure that creates the conditions for the sale of concessions of public services to multinational companies comes from multilateral agencies. You know the saying, “Do not give a man a fish, but teach him instead how to fish”? On occasion I ask myself whether these agencies “are not really asking developing countries to sell their fish-rods and their oceans. 

In Venezuela, we are close to renewing our efforts to privatize certain public services. In this sense, I feel it is important to ask ourselves without any inferiority complex, whether international investors should or should not have access to these services at all. I make reference to complexes simply because I feel many of us suffer from a “globalization insufficiency” complex that now exceeds that of the ardent nationalism that affected us a few decades ago.

What should we do then, in order to insure that national interests are always present in the privatizations that loom in the future? Above everything else, it is important to recognize that the way the privatization process is designed will either attract or scare away national investors. For example, if in the case of the privatization of a power distribution network the state wishes to obtain a large price for selling the utility which it has owned, a price which must then be passed on to the customers of the network itself, the total costs involved will be so high that they will automatically disqualify or discourage any local investor. If on the contrary, use of the power-generation assets were awarded on the basis of who offers to charge the end user the lowest possible rate, local investors would have a better chance of participating. 

Finally as no one is prophet in his own land, looking for foreign support I wish to make reference to a declaration I heard by David Montgomery, Viscount of Alamein, son of Field Marshall Montgomery (Monty) and the new British Ambassador to Mexico. He maintained that he simply could not understand why Argentina had sold all its public utilities to foreign investors. I do not understand it either, but what I am sure of is that unless we wish to lose our country in the waters of globalization, we must define with utmost clarity some strategic borders, and I don’t mean just our geographical ones. 

How depressing! With so much to be gained from globalization, why do they have to do it the wrong way, and why do they have to start doing it wrong just here and now?

Translated from El Universal, Caracas, October 27, 2000

As published in "Voice and Noise", 2006