"Globalization is an attempt to extend corporate monopoly control over the entire globe. Over every national economy, over every local economy, over every life. It does this by treating international corporate property-rights and international corporate investment-rights as supreme, as taking precedence over all other rights including our democratic sovereignty."
Image by geralt - source: Pixabay
These are the first sentences from a speech by Michael Parenti, a professor of political science among other things. Like he says: there's nothing natural about Globalization. It's a conscious effort by large financial forces to preserve the status-quo. The need for Globalization of The Economy is yet another dogma that's implanted in our brains.
This is in stark contrast to what we're normally told:
Globalization, or globalisation, is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. Globalization has accelerated since the 18th century due to advances in transportation and communication technology. This increase in global interactions has caused a growth in international trade and the exchange of ideas and culture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that is associated with social and cultural aspects. However, conflicts and diplomacy are also large parts of the history of globalization, and of modern globalization.
source: Wikipedia
This seems like Globalization is something natural, like it's "meant to be", that advancing technology leaves us no choice... Another quote from Parenti:
Globalization has been treated by its proponents as a natural inevitable process; first we had local economies, then they naturally became regional economies and then national and then international, and now one big Global Economy.... It just "happens" that way.
Fortunately we know better. Like I said in the previous part of this series: the global economy is just a stack of rules and laws agreed upon, often behind closed doors, between large international financial powers. And Globalization is nothing more than an expansionist form of capitalism, it's what we used to call "imperialism". Language is a powerful tool: in the times of Winston Churchill The Department Of War had an honest title, now it's euphemistically called The Department Of Defense, thereby cloaking the expansionist nature of the department. Interesting side-note: the United States Department Of Defense is the world's largest employer with nearly 1.2 million active-duty service members...
If you call it "financial aid", people won't see that the money is actually borrowed by the receiving government, increasing their already gigantic national debt. These loans, done by the IMF and World Bank, come with strict rules by which the receiving government agrees to privatize all common goods and resources to open them up for large western corporations, killing local trade and adding yet another cheap resource to the already "too big to fail" western corporations.
It is not unfortunate that there's so much suffering in the world, next to so much excessive wealth in our part of it. It is a logical consequence of the world being governed by an economy that demands large amounts of scarcity on one hand, and large overproduction on the other. Anyone that says "capitalism works" does not speak for 75% of this planets population, so I ask you: what planet are you from..?
Ever noticed how the economy is often described with natural terms? Sometimes economists sound like weather forecasters: we are threatened by "A Tsunami" of unemployment while there's a "Sense Of Springtime" on Wall Street... In our subconscious minds these links are made permanent: everything in our upbringing teaches us that this is just the way things are. Michael Parenti explains:
All our lives we've heard about the valiant little entrepreneur who markets a new idea, who creates jobs ... performs a valuable service, the mam-and-pap-stores who contribute to the community and the economy... Okay, I'm not talking about them okay? I'm talking about the other 90% of the wealth in this world. I'm talking about the giant financial institutions, the giant transnational corporations that control the lion's share of the worlds worth, that control the populations and the power of nations.
I don't remember where I heard this: "we globalized the economy, but not humanity", but it's as good a description of our current situation I've ever heard. The agreed upon rules and laws that constitute Globalization erase borders for big money, not for normal citizens. Big money roams freely while shackling normal employees to the place they make a living. Normal humans can still move as freely as the size of their wallet permits. They can cross a border only when governments on both sides of that border allow them to do so.
But the company they work at, just gets to leave for a far away country where labor costs but a fraction of what it costs here. This is why the world unified under the banners of Coca Cola, Mc Donalds, CNN, Fox News, The Financial Times, MTV and Nike, has never been so divided. Low and middle wage incomes see their jobs leaving the country, fueling nationalism and blaming the foreigners for "taking our jobs".
In a globalized market economy local needs are serviced by and measured along a global economic ruler. "Efficiency" is measured only in global economical terms. Let me explain. A couple of my friends work at a meat-factory in Denmark. They all live in The Netherlands, like myself. Every day they drive in a little bus to the workplace, crossing two borders, to scrap the remnants of meat from the bones after all the good parts are already processed. This factory not only receives workers from the Netherlands. The cut-in-half cow- and pig carcasses come from The Netherlands and Germany. The processed meat then gets transported to Poland, where it is wrapped in the plastic you buy it in when frequenting your supermarket. Yes, the meat travels through whole Europe, to land back in Dutch and German supermarkets, where the animals came from in the first place.
In a global economy this is efficient! We create jobs everywhere and make money every step along the way. The gross national products of every country involved is blessed with a welcome upshot. And the citizens in those countries are made to believe The Economy works for their benefit by their local politicians. The Economy doesn't care about the pollution caused by all the unnecessary transports, all the unnecessary jobs that come with it: Everybody Needs A Job, remember?
Globalization is rightly often characterized as "The Race To The Bottom": countries, governments do their best to make conditions for big companies to settle there as profitable as possible for those companies. The culmination of this phenomena is seen in the so called "free trade zones" where Nike and Adidas run their sweatshops.
I hope you will from now on question everybody who says that globalization is the way forward. Because unifying humanity is the opposite of our current capitalist version of it. I've been quoting Michael Parenti quite a lot here, so if you're interested in in listening to the entire speech, "Terrorism, Globalism and Conspiracy", you can watch and listen to it in the below linked video. I recommend you do; it has all sorts of valuable insights about our globalized imperialistic economy, like the lies told to get America into the first Gulf War, as well as the war against Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how car accidents are good for the Gross Domestic Product, but bad for people, as so many things are...
Michael Parenti Terrorism Globalism and Conspiracy
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