Remember when times were good? Well, at least they were good in North America. If you weren’t poor. Or disabled. Or black. Or Latino. Or a woman. In fact, things were actually so good that it could still work out for you even if you were disabled, or black, or Latino, or a woman – or all of those at once. Poor was still poor, but all the poor needed to do was stop jerking around and they could be as happy as the rest of us.

 

The North American economy was a powerhouse. As unbelievable as it might seem today, it still is. Because it’s an economy built on war, and we’ve always been really clever about that – we export it. We don’t show any signs of slowing down on that score. And it’s a good idea to fight wars in someone else’s backyard. That way, when buildings and roads and bridges and churches and schools and hospitals get destroyed, at least they aren’t ours. And with a little careful planning, we can make a lot of money rebuilding the stuff we destroyed. Sorry about the people who get killed, but c’mon now – we lose a few of our own too, you know.

 

When there isn’t one of the really good wars going on with powerful enemies – like Japan or Germany – we find instead a bunch of weak countries and bring war to them. Just because we can. It keeps the economy humming.

 

In the few brief minutes when we weren’t at war with someone, there was always the USSR as the bogeyman, and we could build weapons and bombs and stuff, as deterrents. So it really threw everything for a loop when the USSR folded its tent in 1989 and decided it had had enough.

 

The financial wizards looked at all of that in the early 1990s and said, ‘we’ve got a great idea to make it even better. We call it globalization, and you’ll thank us for it.’

 

So what made anyone think the idea of globalization would be good for the globe? Well, there wasn’t anyone behind the drive to globalization who really believed that. Mostly, the greedy class was convinced this was a great way to ensure they could have even more of everything for themselves.

 

They’ve been beating us with our own stick.

To make that happen, they first had to invent neoliberalism with its agenda of privatization, deregulation, free trade, gutting of social spending, massive tax cuts for the wealthy. That is, they had to sell us something that would make us agree to give up all that social activists had achieved over decades, even centuries.

 

The first step had to be to move the means of production away from people who made decent wages, and give it over to people who would work for pennies. In North America, that’s worked out pretty well for the folks at the top of the heap. Even in little pockets around the round, a few ordinary people have seen some minor benefit as people who were previously earning zero cents a day now earn eighteen cents a day. The big thing for the globalizers, though, is that people previously earning thirty bucks an hour, aren’t any longer.

 

Naturally, achieving this step was not sold to the public so blatantly. Oh sure, some unions put up a big fuss about jobs moving offshore and the attack on their livelihoods. But the elite had already done a good enough job over the past few decades positioning the rest of us to believe that the unions should be dismissed as overpaid whiners standing in the way of progress. Since most people don’t earn what, say, autoworkers in North America earn, that was a pretty easy sell to the public.

 

The corporate and government sectors (I’ll pretend that these are not actually the same thing) touted globalization as the ‘engine’ of economic prosperity everywhere. They made clear that this whole idea depended on the premise that international trade would expand faster than domestic trade. They were right in the short term, but completely wrong about what would happen if growth stalled.

 

Between 2007 and 2009, world trade took a nosedive, both domestically and internationally. And for the first time since World War II, international trade slumped faster and harder than domestic trade and turned globalization into the engine of a deep recession. It hit hardest in the countries most dependent on manufacturing, where exports fell more rapidly than at any time since the 1930s.

 

Naturally, unemployment has gone through the roof in most countries and only those with some sort of welfare system in place have been able to prevent starvation and rioting. People who aren’t working are also not spending, compounding the problem. In North America, the problem has no readily available solution because all those good manufacturing jobs were off-shored.

 

About the only place that has not been drastically affected by the economic downslide is Africa – because it mostly had nowhere to go but up. I imagine there are at least some Africans rubbing their hands in anticipation to welcome us as we slope down to their reality.

 

Our answer to all of this? Give lots of money to the banks and investment houses. Never mind that this whole mess is largely their fault; if we just help them out a bit, everything will be okay in the end, you’ll see.

 

Instability

It should be obvious that we have entered into a cycle of lurching from crisis to crisis. The blame for that lies squarely with the neoliberals who brought us globalization. We have become entirely hostage to financial markets and economists.

 

It’s led us to wealth and income being distributed so unequally that the entire system could collapse under its own weight. When the average family has a decent income, they use it to buy things like cars and houses, or to repair their roofs or siding. Rich folk do that too, but there aren’t enough of them to sustain the economy. And they’ve got lots left over that they don’t need for daily living. So they invest it – the generally accepted polite term for gambling. That speculation leads to the creation of new financial tools to allow for even more gambling, leading to the world’s markets teetering on a bridge made up from mere paper transactions that produce nothing, that lead to no increase in jobs or well-being, that lead to nothing of substance.

 

The banks and investment houses are allowed to speculate without restriction, and then to return to the public trough when the results of their playing don’t work out for them. It’s what writer Gore Vidal has long termed ‘socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor’.

 

Our governments are no help. Even if they were serious about trying to serve the needs of their people (a highly speculative premise), they merely paper over the problems with ineffective monetary policies that continue to allow the rich to get richer, the poor even poorer. The one thing that desperately needs to be reined in, to be hit upside the head with a brick, is the financial sector. And it’s the one place that government appears too timid to step.

 

We’re seeing nations all round the world either defaulting on their debts or in very serious trouble because of them. And who’s to blame? Well, partly those nations. But mainly the entire global community that allows the world to be controlled by speculation.

 

Can it get much worse?

Of course. It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black. But it can’t get much worse.

 

Can we fix this? Well, to answer that you really need to define the terms of the question.

 

In order to ‘fix’ the system, capitalism – at least as it’s currently practiced – has to go. It is no longer based on inventing or building or growing things; it’s based solely on moving around bits of paper and betting on them. It would be necessary to kill the over-the-counter derivatives market and to outlaw credit default swaps. It would be necessary to restructure the investment process so that companies build and produce based on what is good for the company and the community rather than solely for the benefit of faceless investors who purchased lottery tickets in those companies. It probably requires a massive overhaul of the stock and trade exchanges that have clearly become nothing more than dealers in games of chance.

 

And it sure as hell requires an outlawing of currency trading.

 

If by ‘fixing’ the system we mean eliminating capitalism entirely, that’s a whole different ballgame. Capitalism is based on the notion of using up every available bit of the earth, until there is nothing left. It can’t function any other way – it must consume and consume, and then consume even bigger. The trick, of course, is trying to be dead before we get to that point of no return.

 

Occupy This-that-or-the-other Street

It’s hard to determine if there is any long-term improvement that will arise from the people who are right now taking to the streets. There are glimpses that suggest these folks are acting out in hopes of fostering a new social contract that will reduce the huge disparity between the top and the bottom. But there are also some disturbing signs that simply moving them up the ladder could placate many of these people.  

 

Still, there is some hope in these actions. People are in the streets in Athens, in London, in Paris, in multiple Arab cities – and now in North America. They aren’t all standing up to be counted for the same overt reasons, but the same base reason is behind it all – the rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. We haven’t completely ruined the earth yet, and there is full capacity to feed and house us all. We may have reached a tipping point with our population size, but that is easily rectified (and no, USA, I don’t mean by bombing a bunch of brown people somewhere).

 

It seems that we are at a crucial place in the history of our species. We can go on as we have, and destroy ourselves quickly. Or we can reform ourselves and try to make the best of what is left of the planet before it eventually kills us all – as it will, eventually. But that doesn’t have to be today, or even next week. With a little careful forethought – we are intelligent, or at least we claim to be – we might be able to keep our oars in the water for many thousands of years to come.

 

So why give thanks for globalization?

The positive side of globalization is the help it is providing in discrediting and increasing the inevitable rush toward the demise of capitalism. Former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev stated that communism would bury capitalism. He was wrong. Instead, capitalism is burying itself. Either way, he wins.

 

If every cloud truly does have a silver lining, we might just owe a debt of thanks to the idiots who foisted globalization upon us in the belief that it was going to enslave us all. It might turn out to be the best thing they could have done for us.

 

 

 

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com.

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