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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 4, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: APEC springs a leak

As the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting opened in Vancouver, Canada, U.S. President Bill Clinton put on his Dr. Feelgood voice to comment on the current disasters shaking Thailand, Indonesia and south Korea and threatening Japan. He called them "a few little glitches in the road."

Although Clinton later took on a more threatening tone, especially with imperialist rival Japan, he certainly didn’t acknowledge that those who will be forced to bear the burden of economic hard times of whatever magnitude will be workers. Already, mass layoffs loom throughout Asia. Bitter rivalry is intensifying among imperialist competitors, especially between the big bosses in the United States and Japan—which, Washington growls, better not try to export its way out of the crisis.

Since the Hong Kong stock market collapsed in October, administration economists have advised calm. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin reassured. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan reassured. And every few weeks another national economy went into hock. As the APEC meeting started, south Korea begged a $20-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and the fourth biggest investment house in Japan closed down.

The financial media were less optimistic than the Clinton administration. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal wrote of the "domino theory" in a new context. "First Thailand went, then Indonesia, now Korea," wrote the Journal, adding that this could turn "into a global recession."

But the Journal too was anxious to hide the main truth about the crisis. Somehow, its writers said, this crisis is particular to south Korea and the Asian capitalist economies where there is more state intervention than in the United States. Not that the Journal would ever dispense with Washington’s largesse toward the military-industrial complex or its subsidies to U.S. monopolies—but somehow in Korea and Japan government meddling is the culprit.

The New York Times described the crisis in more vividly racist terms. Like assorted flu epidemics, the Times blamed capitalism’s ills too on "an Asian virus."

This crisis is neither a mere glitch nor particularly Asian. It is a crisis of world capitalism. Specifically, it is a crisis of capitalist overproduction. In search of ever cheaper labor and higher profits, monopoly capital from Japan, the United States and the European imperialist countries built factories from Seoul to Jakarta. By now they can make many more cars, semiconductors and steel than they can sell at a profit. And these shaky investments have turned the Asian economies into satellites of world imperialism, with governments forced to sell what little independence they had for a handout from the IMF.

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