History: The Failure of the Great Globalist Vision

There is no future in globalization. At least not the kind of globalization that we’ve seen emerge for the last 50 years.

One component of the great globalist vision was that the world would shrink with the advent of modern transportation technology – we could move our products from Baltimore to Beijing and back almost as easily, and often cheaper, then moving them from Baltimore to Cleveland. As we now know however, this vision is in direct opposition to the realities of climate change and a diminishing oil supply.

Another component of the great globalist vision was that the titans of banking and industry would have a global marketplace, unimpeded by the barriers of sovereignty, within which to operate freely. Global markets and all the world’s resources would be at their fingertips and the entire wealth of the world would be consolidated into an integrated global network.

As we can now see clearly, however, the centralization of this global network is its greatest threat. And while it has the power to bring down the economies of the world, there is no global authority to arrest that collapse.  

Inspired by the United States and their early success with tariff free trade (the US was seen as a multi-state, free trade zone), the early globalists, who were loyal to the British crown, set out in the late 19th Century to make a united world. Their first step was to convert the British Empire from a hard, military power to a soft, inductive power. The direct result of this is with us today. It is called the Commonwealth of Nations. Recognizing the desire of the colonies to be free and independent, the Lords of England concocted a scheme whereby they would give the colonies nation status and the pretense of autonomy, while keeping them safely nestled to the Royal teat. (If you doubt the power of the Crown, you need look no further than the recent decision of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, to suspend the Canadian Parliament.)

The next step was to create global organizations, thinktanks and lobbying groups to advocate, and often times manipulate, for the vision of globalization. This movement among Britain’s ruling class was to be spread throughout the establishments of Europe, the East, and the Americas. Naturally, the United States was a particular point of focus. They formed groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and enlisted the barons of Wall Street, mostly through the Morgan and Rockefeller interests. They placed powerful members of their movement in the most important press and media outlets. They recruited politicians and lobbied others. And they worked tirelessly, year after year, decade after decade, behind the scenes as much as possible, for the singular purpose of building this global, political and economic infrastructure.

The world that you see today was not a series accidents, or the inevitable path of progress. It was a deliberate, monumental effort that took generations to accomplish.

And while it was a socio-political movement in the early days, it was not like any movement that came before it because its members were not like any other. They were the wealthiest, and most powerful people on Earth. And they were arguably the first humans to truly grasp the scope of the modern, petroleum world, as only they could. They were its architects.

It was also their vision that foresaw, and brought about the rise of the automobile, rail and air travel. It was this vision that they enlisted Edward Bernays, father of the public relations industry and nephew of Sigmund Freud, to sell to a depressed American public at the 1933 World’s Fair, a fantasy of modernization and the prospects of commerce as an alternative to another vision gaining ground during the Great Depression – FDR’s New Deal.

FDR’s vision has largely faded from memory. The globalist vision persists. But it has changed over the years. The early self image of the globalist as good stewards of the masses, who learned to get along with the New Deal, and gave rise to early 20th Century liberalism, eventually gave way to a new  breed of ruling elite. One that had been influenced by the ideas of people like Ayn Rand, John Nash and James M Buchanan.

This new vision made a virtue of selfishness and incorporated the notions of  the rational man, working for his own self interests, which leads to maximum prosperity for all. This was the brainchild of John Nash, working in the basement of the Rand Corporation, which envisioned humans as rational, calculating self-interest machines. This radical and absurd idea proposes that humanity benefits most when each individual is working only in their own self-interests. In this world, because what is best for the individual is best for the whole, democratic government becomes almost unnecessary. Indeed, the market itself is the most efficient form of democratic expression. Market democracy where your ballot is your credit card.  

These were radical thoughts that had no basis in reality, but they were embraced by the business elite who saw this new “rationalism” as a fresh angle on the age old conflict between the proponents of individual freedom versus those of the common good. It was Adam Smith on steroids. In the business elite’s view, individual freedom, indeed, selfishness, was the path to common good.

By the 1960s, the globalist movement began to embrace these radical ideas and supported their champions with grants and university appointments. They financed thinktanks to propagate, financed the campaigns of like minded politicians, and waged a public relations campaign to sell selfishness to the public.

Seeds were planted in the minds of students at Princeton, MIT, and the Chicago school of economics. From there these new apostles would go out into the real world and try out their economic theories, commonly known as neoliberalism, on real people, in real states.

In the US and UK, they would rise on the tides of Reagan and Thatcher, but their agenda would be tempered by opposition from Democrats and Old Labor. It would actually take the Trojan horses Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to get their revolutions here (Revolution marked by the defeat of serious opposition to the free market, neoliberal orthodoxy.) But other countries, where there wasn’t a long tradition of a middle class and social programs, and only weak or nonexistent labor movements,  weren’t so fortunate. From Chile, Ecuador, to even Russia, everywhere the neoliberals and their radical theories went, economic ruin and social crisis followed. The more freedom the neoliberals got, the more devastated the country’s economy.

Despite the clear failure of neoliberal economics, the global elites refused to abandon ship. Some would acknowledge that globalization hasn’t done a good enough job of benefiting everyone, but they still refused to abandon the ideology. Of course, that ideology is extremely profitable for some. And economic failure for the system as a whole is not always economic failure for the few.

But for many of us who have followed the spread of neoliberal economics, and the destruction in its wake, we have understood the danger of that spread into the US. We have watched as the same exact symptoms we saw in Africa and Latin America throughout the 80s and the 90s began showing up here: massive leveraging of dept, massive increases in corporate profits with rapidly declining wages and standards of living, the disintegration of social and civil services, and expanding and pervasive corruption.

Much of the slow economic decline of the last 40 years in the US has played out in hyperspeed in the neoliberal laboratories of the Third World. If it weren’t for the Democratic party in the US and Old Labor in the UK, the collapse we are experiencing now would have occurred many years ago.

Now, the Superclass is scratching its collective head wondering how it all could have gone so wrong. But they knew. They saw it over and over again, in country after country, and yet inertia kept it going, like a runaway train. They kept forging ahead partly out of greed for certain, but the inertia factor cannot be underestimated. And it is perhaps the greatest obstacle defeating both globalization and the neoliberalism that has spread along its arteries.

The reason why it is important to understand the history of globalization is it is the only way to fully appreciate how old and powerful the movement really is. It has changed over the years, radicalized with the rise of neoliberalism, but it is the same movement that a small crowd of British lords began over a century ago – with the same institutions, even in the same buildings. Some like to see it as some sort of conspiracy. It is much much worse. It is a movement with thousands of members. And many of this movement’s members, the elites of the elites, have been indoctrinated to its goals from childbirth, for generations. They cannot just let it go.

The integration of the world’s global economies, and specifically their financial sectors and central banks, into a concentrated network that is both transnational and extranational, is a severe threat to the sovereignty of nations and their ability to avoid and respond to external economic events of which they have no control.

This is all too apparent to nations across the globe that see the prospects of economic ruin as a direct result of policies and actions originating in the United States. And the US is equally vulnerable to economic events abroad. The globalist have put us in an incredible dangerous predicament: a resounding interdependence, and a lacking international authority with which to manage the system.

To understand fully, let me quickly share an old friend’s “Story of the Two Sidewalks’.

There were two sidewalks. One was old and laid with bricks. The other was new and laid of only a few, large concrete slabs.

Over the years a tree’s roots had grown under the sidewalks, forcing them up above the ground. For the old brick sidewalk, this was inconsequential to its overall integrity as the individual bricks easily conformed and adapted to the new topology.

The concrete slabs did not fair so well. Their singular, rigid structure could not conform and so the slab began to crumble into the dirt. In no time, the concrete slab lost its structural integrity and had to be completely replaced.

It should be clear now that the argument about globalization is no longer limited to lost jobs and the renormalization of American living standards with those of the Third World. We have put our very existence at the mercy of a hostile, and unstable system on which our influence is tenuous at best.  

Aside from the many, commonly expressed concerns about great concentrations of wealth and power, there is another question that is far too rarely addressed in the public sphere: can such a concentrated system even work, or will it, like the concrete slab, disintegrate into ruin? If there were any doubt, recent events make it clear that, though economic decentralization is anathema to the globalist vision, it is essential for our survival.

The globalist movement has failed. It is collapsing as we speak, throughout the world. But this does not mean it is dead. It won’t ever die unless we kill it.

For more background on the history of the globalist movement, see How the US Government Was Overthrown In Three Easy Steps.