Globalization Goes Bankrupt
Free-speech zone?: The
David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, where the G-20 global
economic summit will be held Thursday and Friday, as seen from the
parking lot, which is being leased by the city as the only sanctioned
area for protesters to gather within sight of the center.
By Chris Hedges
The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into
camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are
building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in
the mechanisms of democratic change. You can’t blame them. But unless we
on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and
racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have
the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of
the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will
do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
“The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and
money after everything that has gone wrong,” said Benedicto Martinez
Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT),
who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. “This is what this meeting is
about.”
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in
Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are
a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the
established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not,
the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on
Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed
in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this
plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a
permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the
rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world’s wealthiest
nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat
battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the
area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in
combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000
with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz
gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to
protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and
permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging
to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups
suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail
accounts are being monitored.
Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent
encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city’s
Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People
Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on
the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will
coordinate more protests during the week.
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“It is de facto martial law,” he said, “and the real effort to subvert
the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you
so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build
democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more
authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a
difference. History has taught us this.”
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.
“Each of Globalization’s strengths has
somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning,”
John Ralston Saul
wrote in “The Collapse of Globalism.” “The lowering of national
residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for
massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously
made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle
class—the very basis of democracy—seemed to be just one of those things
that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the
lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive
with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for
not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere
managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed
inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus
insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in
a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism’s essential
principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect
for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people
about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their
own far larger debts in 2009.”
The institutions that once provided
alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies
of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally
bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy.
No one will save us now but ourselves.
“The best thing that happened to the
Establishment is the election of a black president,” Holmes said. “It
will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out.
Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What
happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial
real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are
being kicked out from underneath it.”
“Obama is in trouble,” Holmes went on. “The
economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery
for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it.
He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end.
It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic
Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions
will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their
members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad
causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it
will be a right-wing disaster.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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