“THE GAME IS UP” September 22, 2009
Posted by wmmbb in Humankind/Planet Earth.trackback
So claims Chris Hedges at Truthdig. And what game might that be? In short the monopoly game called globalization, masquerading as capitalism but in reality hand in glove in with government of the wealthy countries.
Chris Hedges writes:
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.
But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. “Speculation,” then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, “is the AIDS of our economies.” We have reached the terminal stage.
Nowhere it seems do the corporations own government more so than in Washington, where they are joined at the hip with the military industrial complex – or do I or does Chris Hedges exaggerate?
Wmmbb – It is very difficult to disagree with much written by Hedges. But this statement seems by far too optimistic to say the very least:
“But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. ”
When has exposure brought change; the two are not inextricably bound.
The game by all indication on Wall Street resumes whether exposed or not. We all know the role that AIG has played in international banking by essentially becoming a hedge fund. To my knowledge this has not changed. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written endlessly on VAR which allows for ridiculous projections.
Taleb makes the point that Larry Summers couldn’t even project well for Harvard and yet he continues to make projections for the economy of the USA and through extension the global economy as an economic adviser to President Obama. Harvard’s endowment has been greatly decreased. The reliance on VAR has not changed to my knowledge.
The international banking system is so intertwined that the world economies teetered on absolute collapse. I don’t think much has changed in this regard. If something has, I would like to know of it. Perhaps Chris Hedges can write a companion piece to the well-written one above.
Thanks, wmmbb, for the post.
Thanks for the comment Judith. I am thinking about this subject somewhat more. I am guessing the place to begin with a definition of globalization and historical framework that may extend back to the birth place of humanity that you reminded me the other day was in Africa.
There are a number of elements. I think we can see in that context the spread of modern humans across the globe, including for example the remarkable navigational feats of the Polynesians in the Pacific. Involved in the geographical dispersion is the development of racial, ethnic and linguistic differentiation.The diffusion of technologies of all kinds and religious beliefs across different societies. The rise of river valley civilizations in the various locations that occurred and their impacts on the adjacent societies, for example the connection between Egypt and Greek. The emergence of nation states in Europe, based on violence, and the development of imperialism supported by the protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, followed in turn by the industrial revolution and modernism. Then we might consider the industrial wars of the nineteenth century – the Civil War – and the Industrial wars of the twentieth century, and the political and social consequences that flowed from them. And so forth.
Long story short, we can be either caught up in the assumptions of this history, or we can decide to do something different. The question are what would that be, and how do we get there?
(Apologies Judith, that is the way I tend to think, and I appreciate others are more grounded – and maybe I should be too. The point, it seems to me, is that we can create a common story that is inclusive of all peoples and all cultures, and with that story we might have basis for common action on the climate and on other issues.)