Globalization is widely touted in the mass media as both inevitable and good. But why? It is claimed that products are more efficiently produced, labor is more productive, technology is improved by greater innovation, and capital is more efficiently allocated. But wait, there’s less!
According to Paul Hellyer, former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada,
“Globalization is really a code name for corporatization. It’s an attempt by the largest corporations in the world, and the largest banks in the world, to re-engineer the world in such a way that they won’t have to pay decent wages to their employees, and they won’t have to pay taxes to fix potholes and to maintain parks, and to pay pensions to the old and handicapped.”
Corruption of Economic Purpose
We have to ask, what’s the point of having an economy anyway? Is the purpose of an economy to serve the special interests of giant transnational corporations? Or should it be to serve the needs of the human population? (No, corporations are not persons.) I would have to answer that the only excuse for having a particular economy is to better support the happiness of the people. When basic needs are met, happiness is maximized. How is that achieved? If an economy provides enough jobs and income for people to live comfortably in a stable safe environment, I’d say it has succeeded.
If an economy grows at a healthy pace by eliminating jobs and reducing household income of ordinary workers to secure higher corporate profits, then it has failed. If work is available and wages are livable, then it has succeeded. Social science research has shown that income improves happiness only up to the point of a modest middle-class life. After that, it fails to contribute to happiness. Today’s accelerating and extreme disparity in wealth and income between the 1% and the 99% reflects a dangerously defective economy.
In fact, the wonders of globalization all accrue to the giant transnational corporations that control the world economy. These enormous organizations are constrained only by nations’ laws meant to protect people and the earth. Environmental laws, labor laws, safety laws, all protect populations and ecologies from damage due to uncontrolled exploitation. The “globalists” make international trade deals in secret to exempt themselves and override the protection of people and the planet. Having bought off Congress, they “fast track” legislation that circumvents national sovereignty to liberate capital, enslave labor, and exploit the planet.
NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) and now the “Trans Pacific Partnership” (TPP), are secretly negotiated, then “fast-tracked” through Congress, without deliberation. They actually take precedence over the sovereignty of nations that agree to them. Their corporate courts can overrule national environmental, labor and safety laws. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the freedom of international capital to exploit labor, and generally plunder the planet. Does that contribute to human happiness? In this equation, people are the dependent variable; their happiness is irrelevant. Human needs and happiness are not the determinants of globalization; they are its victims.
An Intentional Economy
For an economy to be morally justified, it must serve human needs and not destroy the ecosphere upon which we all depend. Human survival in the very near future will depend upon whether we can re-cast the economy to reflect human needs under local conditions. That will mean distributed food and energy production, re-designing technology to fit the needs of communities, and reorganizing the flow of capital to serve the needs of local democratic ecological economies. All of these things will require both lots of labor and a major reallocation of capital.
A huge amount of imaginary capital exists today in the “Too Big to Fail Banks.” That phantom “money” was created by the Fed buying the largely worthless debt of the Big Banks to cover their speculative losses. All that must simply be abandoned and a banking system re-created to serve local and regional needs for investing in ecologically creative ways. That alone will create many jobs. An ecological economy will directly serve the needs of humans where they live while intentionally reducing carbon emissions. Such choices will build a survivable future for people and the planet’s diversity of species. An intentionally ecological economy is necessary to sustain the environment we depend on. Any chance for human happiness depends on it.
In the New Ecological Economy, if we will have it, industrial and trade policies will be determined by human needs and the necessities of sustaining the ecosphere of which we are a part. There is simply no getting around it. But to support human happiness, who would want to? Today, those who would traffic in any kind of human misery for a profit still rule the global corporate-growth economy. Any movement in the exact opposite direction toward building an economy intended to serve human happiness must begin from the ground up.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 