Globalism Ascendant
Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free trade: Daley was instrumental in the passage of NAFTA; Sperling, yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus given significant responsibility in economic matters, was involved in getting China to join the WTO; and Goolsbee was the one who reassured the Canadians that Obama's anti-NAFTA comments at campaign stops in the industrial Midwest represented empty campaign rhetoric, nothing more. Goolsbee was of course right, as shown by these appointments.
What these appointments also show is the iron grip the ideology of globalism now has on the elites in both parties. As Paul Craig Roberts has long shown through his detailed examination of government employment figures, America is no longer creating jobs in sectors subject to foreign competition. Indeed, last year American corporations created more jobs outside the United States than in this country. Yet it has not dawned on our political elites that maybe there is a problem with trying to revive an economy by encouraging consumer spending when what consumers go out and buy is no longer made in the United States.
Or maybe it has dawned on them and they just don't care. After all, the economic elites who are funding both parties generally don't care. Steve Sailer recently highlighted an article by Chrystia Freeland in the Atlantic on "The Rise of the New Global Elite." Writes Freeland: "today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind." Freeland also notes that the sense of belonging to a global elite class "helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global 'nation' in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving." Quite a change from the patriotic businessmen who helped make the American economy the envy of the world.
None of this is new. Christopher Lasch wrote about it in The Revolt of the Elites and Pat Buchanan ran several campaigns emphasizing the threat globalism posed to the American nation and the American economy. Sadly, Lasch and Buchanan were ignored. If America is going to survive, those warning us of the perils of globalism can be ignored no longer.
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I read that Chrystia Freeland article as well a few days ago.
Here's what comes to my mind.
Businessmen have always been a cosmopolitan people and there has not been a single time in history when they were not. That's because business IS a cosmopolitan thing. Because differences exist in geographic regions, business pops up to meet what lacks in one place through what is there in another. Medieval Hanseatic merchants from Roskilde, Novgorod, Riga, Magdeburg, Oslo, and other cities would keep moving from one of those ports to another and choose any of them as their residence. They would speak the languages of all those places, and invest their capital wherever they chose.
So I feel Chrystia Freeland's view is based on a very myopic picture of the past and she'd have to look much much further back. Nationalism is a new thing, nations are a new thing, and a businessman was never hindered by regional language or culture. Indeed, he could just speak German, Italian, and French, and voila! he is as good a native of Bern as he is of Milan.
It would be a strange argument to make that medieval peoples were victims of globalism. As it is, 150 years ago, we were at the peak of cosmopolitan business, where the European aristocracy all spoke French and knew each other while ordinary people could order goods from all over the world with a catalog and a mail order while putting their savings into any municipality's bonds they chose. WWI shattered all that, and business was then near impossible across borders. Interestingly, people were still (maybe even more) proud and patriotic in the 19th century, but business was business, nothing more and nothing less.
Pat Buchanan and Christopher Lasch weren't so much ignored but were outnumbered by a globalist elite that was in virtually unchallenged ascendancy in the 1990s. As Chrystia Freeland's article informs, the global elite remains fascinated with itself. Yet the wisdom of that elite is no longer respected by the masses as a majority is now convinced that globalism does not work for them. The current economic malaise can be temporarily alleviated by interventions of the American Federal Reserve Board and the German government but the people of America and Europe have come to realize that the golden years of the 1983-2008 and 1946-73 are not coming back. Globalism is in retreat despite its monopoly over the big institutions of the West.
"Businessmen" did not generally rule the medieval economy. The power was in the landed classes who were very much attached to their localities. Besides, merchants in the middle ages had to deal with a lot of local rules-regulations which were in place to protect local producers. While they could trade all over the world if they liked, they couldn't simply destroy the local economy/culture at their whim. When The Revolution began, one of the first things done was to try to destroy the old guilds and laws that tended to prevent a "laissez faire" or "free trade" economy.
A new website critical of the proposed US-South Korea free trade agreement:
http://stopuskoreanafta.org/
From the website:
Top 10 reasons to oppose the NAFTA-style Korea trade pact
Undermines U.S. sovereignty in favor of international law & foreign tribunals of UN & World Bank.
Violates U.S. Constitution by circumventing Congressional authority regarding appropriation of U.S. tax dollars.
State legislators oppose because it undermines State’s sovereignty.
Negotiated with expedited Executive authority & Congress is banned from amending or fully debating it.
Kills almost 160,000 U.S. jobs & encourages offshoring by multi-national corporations.
Favors powerful multi-national corporations over U.S. small business even when bidding for government contracts.
Not real “free trade” – benefits Korea much more than U.S. & increases U.S. trade deficit by $16.7 billion.
Allows unsafe food products into U.S.
Benefits the NORTH Korea & strengthens Chinese leverage against us.
Throws open the doors to Korean immigration