Mastering the Meltdown- Professor Haseler's new book explains recent downturn
2nd December 2008
Professor Stephen Haseler, Director of The Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University is to launch a new book detailing aspects of the current economic meltdown.
Meltdown: How the 'Masters of the Universe' Destroyed the West's Power and Prosperity, is certain to create controversy. It tells the full story, as dramatic as it is frightening, of how over two decades the West’s leaders - the financiers on Wall Street and the politicians in Washington (with elements in the City of London in tow) - destroyed their people’s prosperity and stability. It shows how greed and irresponsibility took hold during the 1990s, but argues that it was the era’s political leaders - from Bill Clinton to George Bush to Tony Blair - who are ultimately responsible. He shows how they allowed and encouraged the mortgage debt disaster now afflicting the middle class; how they nurtured a super-rich global elite, shorn of any sense of accountability, to go in search of low costs in Asia, thus destroying wealth and jobs in the West.
Meltdown tells a classic tale of hubris - of how the West’s elites, having won the Cold War against communism in the late 1980s, allowed the victory to go to their heads. They sought to remake the world through both soft and hard power - starting in the 1990s through economic ‘globalisation’, ‘free trade’ and ‘free markets’, and, under George Bush after 9/11, through the barrel of a gun in Iraq.
Professor Haseler shows how this neo-conservative ‘Americanisation project’ was always doomed to failure. Americans were living beyond their means - fuelled by a gigantic debt bubble which is now bursting as Wall Street implodes. And ‘hard’ Pentagon power, though unsurpassed, was not able to transform the Middle East, let alone the world. Americans were living in a multipolar, not a unipolar, world.
Stephen Haseler also shows how our present capitalist system has lost its moral compass and now threatens democracy itself. And how it has nurtured the rise of China, which now presents the West with its greatest challenge of all. He asks, and answers, the urgent questions: Can the West meet the Asian challenge? Should America and Europe unite? Or go their separate ways? And can we fashion a new, more responsible and sustainable, capitalism?
Professor Stephen Haseler will speak about the new book on Tuesday 9 December at its Global Policy Institute launch which will be Chaired by Professor Lord Robert Skidelsky, Biographer of John Maynard Keynes. Larry Elliott, Economics Editor of The Guardian, will also be present. For further event details please click here.
Stephen Haseler is author of fourteen books on British and European politics, and is editor of the journal Social Europe. He has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, in London and in Washington D.C. and has been a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. He has also been active in public life in Britain. He appears regularly on TV and radio.