Nanabush Westwind Globalism is operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By oligarchical I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accounable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By corporation, I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a person, with rights, but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendall Berry put it, a corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral alligience........It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money(Wendall Berry, The idea of a local Economy, orion on line orion, 2002). The corporate oligarchs of say, Wal-mart, Archer Daniels Midland, and the Disney Corporation wer not neccessarily evil peple, but it was the nature of their actions that a great deal of harm came to localities and local people in them . Under the banner of free market globalism, the chief side effect of oligarchical corporations making its money piles bigger was the systemic destruction of local economies and therefore local communities. Thus, the richest nation in the world in the early twenty-first century had become a amazing panorama of ruined towns and cities with broken institutions and demoralized populations- surrounded by Wal-Mart and Target stores. The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition betwenn individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons in a given locality. Thus Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in retail competition because he couldnt order 50,000 coffee-makers at a crack of a whip from a factory 12,00o miles away in Hangzhou, and recive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasnt as though he hadnt been given the chance. The free-market also referred to an extreme version of the old idea of comparitave advantage, which had meant originally that every locality has something special it is good at producing. or some raw material in ready supply, and that a larger macro economy is made up of such specialist trading partners. Under globalism, this was modified to mean that for the sake of efficiency such trading partners ought to forget everything else and pump out as much of their speciality as possible (using the money recieved to buy goods and services from other specialists). There were a number of problems with this simplistic idea. One was that cheap oil subsidized the whole system, and the system would have been impossible without it. JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER The long emergency surviving the end of cheap oil, climate change, and other CONVERGING CATASTROPHES of the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 2005-2006 PG. 186-187.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 08:07:26 +0000
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