The
Collapse of Globalization
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_collapse_of_globalization_20110328/
Posted on
Mar 27, 2011
By Chris
Hedges
The
uprisings in the Middle East, the
unrest that is tearing apart
nations such as the Ivory Coast,
the bubbling discontent in
Greece, Ireland and Britain and
the labor disputes in states such
as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the
collapse of globalization. They
presage a world where vital
resources, including food and
water, jobs and security, are
becoming scarcer and harder to
obtain. They presage growing
misery for hundreds of millions
of people who find themselves
trapped in failed states,
suffering escalating violence and
crippling poverty. They presage
increasingly draconian controls
and force-take a look at what is
being done to Pfc. Bradley
Manning-used to protect the
corporate elite who are
orchestrating our
demise.
We must
embrace, and embrace rapidly, a
radical new ethic of simplicity
and rigorous protection of our
ecosystem-especially the
climate-or we will all be holding
on to life by our fingertips. We
must rebuild radical socialist
movements that demand that the
resources of the state and the
nation provide for the welfare of
all citizens and the heavy hand
of state power be employed to
prohibit the plunder by the
corporate power elite. We must
view the corporate capitalists
who have seized control of our
money, our food, our energy, our
education, our press, our health
care system and our governance as
mortal enemies to be
vanquished.
Adequate
food, clean water and basic
security are already beyond the
reach of perhaps half the world's
population. Food prices have
risen 61 percent globally since
December 2008, according to the
International Monetary Fund. The
price of wheat has exploded, more
than doubling in the last eight
months to $8.56 a bushel. When
half of your income is spent on
food, as it is in countries such
as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the
Ivory Coast, price increases of
this magnitude bring with them
malnutrition and starvation. Food
prices in the United States have
risen over the past three months
at an annualized rate of 5
percent. There are some 40
million poor in the United States
who devote 35 percent of their
after-tax incomes to pay for
food. As the cost of fossil fuel
climbs, as climate change
continues to disrupt agricultural
production and as populations and
unemployment swell, we will find
ourselves convulsed in more
global and domestic unrest. Food
riots and political protests will
be inevitable. But it will not
necessarily mean more
democracy.
The refusal
by all of our liberal
institutions, including the
press, universities, labor and
the Democratic Party, to
challenge the utopian assumptions
that the marketplace should
determine human behavior permits
corporations and investment firms
to continue their assault,
including speculating on
commodities to drive up food
prices. It permits coal, oil and
natural gas corporations to
stymie alternative energy and
emit deadly levels of greenhouse
gases. It permits agribusinesses
to divert corn and soybeans to
ethanol production and crush
systems of local, sustainable
agriculture. It permits the war
industry to drain half of all
state expenditures, generate
trillions in deficits, and profit
from conflicts in the Middle East
we have no chance of winning. It
permits corporations to evade the
most basic controls and
regulations to cement into place
a global neo-feudalism. The last
people who should be in charge of
our food supply or our social and
political life, not to mention
the welfare of sick children, are
corporate capitalists and Wall
Street speculators. But none of
this is going to change until we
turn our backs on the Democratic
Party, denounce the orthodoxies
peddled in our universities and
in the press by corporate
apologists and construct our
opposition to the corporate state
from the ground up. It will not
be easy. It will take time. And
it will require us to accept the
status of social and political
pariahs, especially as the
lunatic fringe of our political
establishment steadily gains
power. The corporate state has
nothing to offer the left or the
right but fear. It uses fear-fear
of secular humanism or fear of
Christian fascists-to turn the
population into passive
accomplices. As long as we remain
afraid nothing will
change.
Friedrich
von Hayek and Milton Friedman,
two of the major architects for
unregulated capitalism, should
never have been taken seriously.
But the wonders of corporate
propaganda and corporate funding
turned these fringe figures into
revered prophets in our
universities, think tanks, the
press, legislative bodies, courts
and corporate boardrooms. We
still endure the cant of their
discredited economic theories
even as Wall Street sucks the
U.S. Treasury dry and engages
once again in the speculation
that has to date evaporated some
$40 trillion in global wealth. We
are taught by all systems of
information to chant the mantra
that the market knows
best.
It does not
matter, as writers such as John
Ralston Saul have pointed out,
that every one of globalism's
promises has turned out to be a
lie. It does not matter that
economic inequality has gotten
worse and that most of the
world's wealth has became
concentrated in a few hands. It
does not matter that the middle
class-the beating heart of any
democracy-is disappearing and
that the rights and wages of the
working class have fallen into
precipitous decline as labor
regulations, protection of our
manufacturing base and labor
unions have been demolished. It
does not matter that corporations
have used the destruction of
trade barriers as a mechanism for
massive tax evasion, a technique
that allows conglomerates such as
General Electric to avoid paying
any taxes. It does not matter
that corporations are exploiting
and killing the ecosystem on
which the human species depends
for life. The steady barrage of
illusions disseminated by
corporate systems of propaganda,
in which words are often replaced
with music and images, are
impervious to truth. Faith in the
marketplace replaces for many
faith in an omnipresent God. And
those who dissent-from Ralph
Nader to Noam Chomsky-are
banished as heretics.
The aim of
the corporate state is not to
feed, clothe or house the masses,
but to shift all economic, social
and political power and wealth
into the hands of the tiny
corporate elite. It is to create
a world where the heads of
corporations make $900,000 an
hour and four-job families
struggle to survive. The
corporate elite achieves its aims
of greater and greater profit by
weakening and dismantling
government agencies and taking
over or destroying public
institutions. Charter schools,
mercenary armies, a for-profit
health insurance industry and
outsourcing every facet of
government work, from clerical
tasks to intelligence, feed the
corporate beast at our expense.
The decimation of labor unions,
the twisting of education into
mindless vocational training and
the slashing of social services
leave us ever more enslaved to
the whims of corporations. The
intrusion of corporations into
the public sphere destroys the
concept of the common good. It
erases the lines between public
and private interests. It creates
a world that is defined
exclusively by naked
self-interest.
The
ideological proponents of
globalism-Thomas Friedman, Daniel
Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony
Giddens-are stunted products of
the self-satisfied, materialistic
power elite. They use the utopian
ideology of globalism as a moral
justification for their own
comfort, self-absorption and
privilege. They do not question
the imperial projects of the
nation, the widening disparities
in wealth and security between
themselves as members of the
world's industrialized elite and
the rest of the planet. They
embrace globalism because it,
like most philosophical and
theological ideologies, justifies
their privilege and power. They
believe that globalism is not an
ideology but an expression of an
incontrovertible truth. And
because the truth has been
uncovered, all competing economic
and political visions are
dismissed from public debate
before they are even
heard.
The defense
of globalism marks a disturbing
rupture in American intellectual
life. The collapse of the global
economy in 1929 discredited the
proponents of deregulated
markets. It permitted alternative
visions, many of them products of
the socialist, anarchist and
communist movements that once
existed in the United States, to
be heard. We adjusted to economic
and political reality. The
capacity to be critical of
political and economic
assumptions resulted in the New
Deal, the dismantling of
corporate monopolies and heavy
government regulation of banks
and corporations. But this time
around, because corporations
control the organs of mass
communication, and because
thousands of economists, business
school professors, financial
analysts, journalists and
corporate managers have staked
their credibility on the
utopianism of globalism, we speak
to each other in gibberish. We
continue to heed the advice of
Alan Greenspan, who believed the
third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was
an economic prophet, or Larry
Summers, whose deregulation of
our banks as treasury secretary
under President Bill Clinton
helped snuff out some $17
trillion in wages, retirement
benefits and personal savings. We
are assured by presidential
candidates like Mitt Romney that
more tax breaks for corporations
would entice them to move their
overseas profits back to the
United States to create new jobs.
This idea comes from a former
hedge fund manager whose personal
fortune was amassed largely by
firing workers, and only
illustrates how rational
political discourse has descended
into mindless sound
bites.
We are
seduced by this childish happy
talk. Who wants to hear that we
are advancing not toward a
paradise of happy consumption and
personal prosperity but a
disaster? Who wants to confront a
future in which the rapacious and
greedy appetites of our global
elite, who have failed to protect
the planet, threaten to produce
widespread anarchy, famine,
environmental catastrophe,
nuclear terrorism and wars for
diminishing resources? Who wants
to shatter the myth that the
human race is evolving morally,
that it can continue its giddy
plundering of non-renewable
resources and its profligate
levels of consumption, that
capitalist expansion is eternal
and will never cease?
Dying
civilizations often prefer hope,
even absurd hope, to truth. It
makes life easier to bear. It
lets them turn away from the hard
choices ahead to bask in a
comforting certitude that God or
science or the market will be
their salvation. This is why
these apologists for globalism
continue to find a following. And
their systems of propaganda have
built a vast, global Potemkin
village to entertain us. The tens
of millions of impoverished
Americans, whose lives and
struggles rarely make it onto
television, are invisible. So are
most of the world's billions of
poor, crowded into fetid slums.
We do not see those who die from
drinking contaminated water or
being unable to afford medical
care. We do not see those being
foreclosed from their homes. We
do not see the children who go to
bed hungry. We busy ourselves
with the absurd. We invest our
emotional life in reality shows
that celebrate excess, hedonism
and wealth. We are tempted by the
opulent life enjoyed by the
American oligarchy, 1 percent of
whom control more wealth than the
bottom 90 percent
combined.
The
celebrities and reality
television stars whose foibles we
know intimately live indolent,
self-centered lives in sprawling
mansions or exclusive Manhattan
apartments. They parade their
sculpted and surgically enhanced
bodies before us in designer
clothes. They devote their lives
to self-promotion and personal
advancement, consumption, parties
and the making of money. They
celebrate the cult of the self.
And when they have meltdowns we
watch with gruesome fascination.
This empty existence is the one
we are taught to admire and
emulate. This is the life, we are
told, we can all have. The
perversion of values has created
a landscape where corporate
management by sleazy figures like
Donald Trump is confused with
leadership and where the ability
to accumulate vast sums of money
is confused with intelligence.
And when we do glimpse the poor
or working class on our screens,
they are ridiculed and taunted.
They are objects of contempt,
whether on "The Jerry Springer
Show" or "Jersey
Shore."
The
incessant chasing after status,
personal advancement and wealth
has plunged most of the country
into unmanageable debt. Families,
whose real wages have dropped
over the past three decades, live
in oversized houses financed by
mortgages they often cannot
repay. They seek identity through
products. They occupy their
leisure time in malls buying
things they do not need. Those of
working age spend their weekdays
in little cubicles, if they still
have steady jobs, under the heels
of corporations that have
disempowered American workers and
taken control of the state and
can lay them off on a whim. It is
a desperate scramble. No one
wants to be left
behind.
The
propagandists for globalism are
the natural outgrowth of this
image-based and culturally
illiterate world. They speak
about economic and political
theory in empty clichés.
They cater to our subliminal and
irrational desires. They select a
few facts and isolated data and
use them to dismiss historical,
economic, political and cultural
realities. They tell us what we
want to believe about ourselves.
They assure us that we are
exceptional as individuals and as
a nation. They champion our
ignorance as knowledge. They tell
us that there is no reason to
investigate other ways of
organizing and governing our
society. Our way of life is the
best. Capitalism has made us
great. They peddle the
self-delusional dream of
inevitable human progress. They
assure us we will be saved by
science, technology and
rationality and that humanity is
moving inexorably
forward.
None of
this is true. It is a message
that defies human nature and
human history. But it is what
many desperately want to believe.
And until we awake from our
collective self-delusion, until
we carry out sustained acts of
civil disobedience against the
corporate state and sever
ourselves from the liberal
institutions that serve the
corporate juggernaut-especially
the Democratic Party-we will
continue to be rocketed toward a
global catastrophe.
Chris
Hedges' column appears every
Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a
fellow at The Nation Institute
and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, is the author of
"Death of the Liberal
Class."
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