The Threat of Globalism - 1999
Realizing this is 2009 I feel this paper deserves a review. The author, Edward S. Herman, voices strong reservations towards promises of universal peace and prosperity offered as selling points for an interconnected global economy under the reign of elite internationalist. He also takes aim at the role of corporate-owned media towards convincing the masses that surrendering economic and political soverngity is OK because it's an expression of freedom. Besides, it's enivable, so don't fight it. What wasn't mentioned then, and is never mentioned today - when a free man surrenders his independence, be it political, economic, or physical, it is rarely returned without a fight.
Highlights:
Globalization is just one of an array of concepts and arguing points that have been mobilized to advance the corporate agenda. Others have been deregulation and getting government off our backs, balancing the budget, cutting back entitlements (non-corporate), and free trade.
Like free trade, globalization has an aura of virtue. Just as "freedom" must be good, so globalization hints at internationalism and solidarity between countries, as opposed to nationalism and protectionism, which have negative connotations. The possibility that cross-border trade and investment might be economically damaging to the weaker party, or that they might erode democratic controls in both the stronger and weaker countries, is excluded from consideration by mainstream economists and pundits. It is also unthinkable in the mainstream that the contest between free trade and globalization, on the one hand, and "protectionism" on the other, might be reworded as a struggle between "protection"--of transnational corporate (TNC) rights--versus the "freedom" of democratic governments to regulate in the interests of domestic non-corporate constituencies.
As an ideology, globalization connotes not only freedom and internationalism, but, as it helps realize the benefits of free trade, and thus comparative advantage and the division of labor, it also supposedly enhances efficiency and productivity. Because of these virtues, and the alleged inability of governments to halt "progress," globalization is widely perceived as beyond human control, which further weakens resistance.
Because globalization has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates, the upper 5% of households have been able to skim off a large fraction of the reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock market values to rise rapidly. But it was a different story for the global majority. Income inequality rose markedly both within and between countries. In the United States, despite a 35% increase in productivity between 1973 and 1995, the median real wage rate was lower in the latter year. Inequality rose to levels of 70 years earlier, and underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss, and worker speedup under "lean" production systems all increased.Insecurity is functional. As Alan Greenspan complacently explained to Congress in 1997, wage rates were stagnant in this country because worker insecurity was high. That this high insecurity level reduced the well-being of the affected workers did not bother Greenspan, or Congress and the mainstream media.
The gap in incomes between the 20% of the world's population in the richest and poorest countries has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 82 to 1 in 1995, and Third World conditions have in many respects worsened. Per capita incomes have fallen in more than 70 countries over the past 20 years; some 3 billion people--half the world's population, live on under two dollars a day; and 800 million suffer from malnutrition. In the Third World, unemployment and underemployment are rampant, massive poverty exists side-by-side with growing elite affluence, and 75 million people a year or more seeking asylum or employment in the North, as Third World governments allow virtually unrestricted capital flight and seek no options but to attract foreign investment.
The new global order has also been characterized by increased financial volatility, and from the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s to the Mexican breakdown of 1994-95 to the current Asian debacle, financial crises have become more and more threatening. With increasing privatization and deregulation, the discrepancy between the power of unregulated financial forces and that of governments and regulatory bodies increases and the potential for a global breakdown steadily enlarges.
Only an elite perspective permits this record to be regarded as an economic success.
