Chris Hedges sums up the collapse of globalization.

The Collapse of Globalization
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."
http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2011/03/29/threat-...


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