Globalization redux

I think if Thoreau were suddenly to appear on the scene today, it would take him a while to get his bearings, certainly, but he would get a handle on globalization eventually and would recognize it for what it is: another unsustainable instance of mankind becoming the tool of its tools. He warned against that over and over in Walden. As with so many of the developments in modern civilization, human society has adapted its living arrangements to what is technologically possible. Thus, in the "gee whiz" writing of essentially shallow and unscientific thinkers like Tom Friedman, the circumstance that a technology like fiber optic cables can be used to hook up faraway call centers so that formerly poor peasants in Bangalore can answer your questions about your Dell Computer is something that has to be done because it's possible to do it. First the technological breakthrough, then the adaptation of society.

In a similar, lower-tech way, the fact that American businesses can open factories in China and other Asian and Latin American countries where the cost of labor is much lower, and the environmental damage can be treated as someone else's "externality," means that this has to be the way to go. Again, because it can be done. Following on such massive integration of the world's economies, it is only natural that the financial systems should be melded into banking behemoths like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which act as proxy governments and fiscal armies for the developed world to control the economies in the Third World. Such integration can lead to very severe unintended (although inevitable) consequences such as runaway inflation in countries such as Tunisia (and now spreading to the Middle East) causing food riots, as the money printing by the West slops over into vulnerable economies where the peasantry is forced to spend upwards of 50% of their income for food and water. Also, when one large economy engages in systematic financial fraud, as the United States did during most of the period 2000 to 2008, the entire world economy is brought down because of all the monetary and economic connections among the various nations.

One is accused, of course, of being a Luddite and an unrealistic person if you assert that this state of affairs is a kind of consensus insanity. It is complex beyond human control or comprehension, it is inherently unstable and subject to Black Swan events, and it's a drag to think about it all. It is defended primarily because those in a position to profit from the complexity and integration control the organs of government and power, such as the U.S. Congress, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lower Manhattan.

A different question would be posed by Henry David Thoreau: is it a good way to live?

One of the major victims of globalization has been the American economy. With the full complicity and even enabling of the U.S. government, the industrial economy of the United States has been hollowed out and made dependent on inputs of recycled fiat money that American citizens sent abroad in the first place to (a) buy things we don't make anymore or (b) buy things we're running out of and refuse to replace, such as oil. The typical answer to such observations is that, well sure, it's unfortunate that the U.S. is sinking in terms of its output, its educational and quality of life standards, and that it bases its economy now on financial swindles and money printing, but hey - that's just the way the modern world is. The USA cannot be an island. Instead, we should be grateful that our largest employer, Wal-Mart, stocks a lot of stuff we don't really need, all made in China, and sells it to Wal-Mart employees whose money is sent to China so that it can be reinvested in U.S. Treasuries and then doled out to banks who can lend it to Wal-Mart employees who want to buy an inflated-price McMansion and live in it for a couple of years until they lose it to foreclosure. Or so the system used to work until a few years ago. Now it doesn't work at all. The Chinese cannot even lend us enough so we've taken to buying our own debt and calling the process "GDP growth."

A moment's reflection reveals that this answer cannot possibly make any sense. If one thinks of the USA more as a commune and less as a switchboard and "platform" for the wealthiest 1% to take advantage of globalism to achieve a lifestyle unavailable to the other 99% (and to widen that gap year by year), one can see that the United States, more than virtually any other country, does in fact have the complete wherewithal to sustain itself with only moderate inputs from the rest of the world. (Note to the NSA: I'm using "commune" not in the sense of Karl Marx, but perhaps more in the sense of collective action, as in a kibbutz or similar communal arrangement.) We export food because we raise more than we need. We are in a latitude almost uniquely favorable to massive development of solar and wind power. Instead of selling off our 3rd largest solar power manufacturer to China (as is contemplated in the Obama-Hu meetings underway now), we could build a huge alternative manufacturing industry here. We could revive what was once the greatest railroad system in the world.

In short, we have everything necessary to sustain our vital heat, with a lot of margin left for building the necessary complements to a full life. It isn't necessary at all to go all-in on this globalization insanity. Water seeks its own level, and what we are allowing the U.S. to do is to sink to a level commensurate with the wretched of the Earth so that an elite which profits from global integration can continue to get obscenely rich.

If the Tea Party, or someone, could figure all that out, we could start moving away from unstable, unprofitable complexity and toward self-reliance and a sane life. The problem, however, is that as C. Wright Mills told us many years ago, the governing principle of those in power is to make decisions which tend to perpetuate their power. Thus, change will come about, in the American instance, following collapse, when there is no other choice.

Just read this book and nobody gets hurt

Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave.

These are among the most frightening words in the English language. They are posted now on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. These words, really six words and an initial, portend another disaster for American society, for they mean that Thomas L. Friedman is going to publish another book. There is probably no way to stop him. I am personally a supporter of First Amendment rights, I do not believe in prior restraint, and I don't suppose there's a way to characterize a Friedman book as yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Although it's a close call.

It could be argued, and I suppose I'm arguing it now, that Thomas L. Friedman has been perhaps the single-most deleterious force in American society over the last 15 years or so. Certainly from the time he began cheerleading for the Iraq War in 2002, but his destructiveness cannot be confined to his insane insistence that after 9/11 the important thing was to attack an Arab country, virtually any Arab country, as he told Charlie Rose in that infamous interview. No, all of that, even his hypnotically boring insistence that the Iraq war could produce a "decent outcome" if we would all just give it another Friedman Unit (6 months) - all of this was very bad for the country, indeed, but it was not fatal.

No, what was fatal was Tom's pimping for globalization. In a series of books with the clunkiest, most infelicitous titles in the history of American letters, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, Hot Flat & Crowded, (it's painful just to look at them), Tom laid out his case for the unalloyed blessings of the "plug&play world," of integrated world markets, of offshoring of American manufacturing jobs so these "old economy" careers could be replaced with higher-tech jobs worthy of our educated, dynamic work force, and so that peasants in China and India and Malaysia could be lifted up out of poverty to become insatiable consumers of all that wonderful stuff America was going to be making in its New Economy.

It didn't really turn out that way. Instead, we went to Hell in a handbasket, replacing those solid middle class jobs with Wal-Mart greeters hired out of the probation department of the local medium security prison. Still, Tom had a lot of fun making up names for all the technological razzle-dazzle that made globalization such a cool thing: in-sourcing, for example. Throwing all those hip techie terms around like "fiber optics" and "work flow software." I had the sense, when I tried to read parts of one or two of the books, that Tom's real grasp of the underlying technical detail was nonexistent, that just using the names was as deep as it went. Still, here's the important point: the one certain way to make money from globalization, aside from being a multinational exploiter of the lax labor and environmental laws of the Third World while dumping all of your overpaid American factory workers who had the audacity to demand a living wage - is to write books about it. True, they're terrible books. The writing is awful, the metaphors don't work, his neologisms make you cringe. But how do we measure the success of a book in America? I guess by its presence on...the New York Times Bestseller List! Here it must be admitted that Friedman has something of a built-in advantage.

I think we're beginning to see the end of globalization now. It depends so much on the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels to move all that stuff around (including oil itself), and even though Tom is a big advocate of "geo-green" technology (writing about it in the den of his 12,000 square foot house in Bethesda, Maryland, affluence made possible in part, aside from all the awful books, by his marriage into one of the largest shopping mall fortunes on the face of this Flat World of ours), we're probably not going to be able to "scale" such technology (one of Tom's favorite "verbs") in time to avoid a major disruption. Thus, along with surging food prices now leading to social unrest and revolution in Third World countries, secondary to the massive inflation caused by all the fiat money printing in the developed world, the table has been set for the general collapse of all this misguided global integration.

Like the guy at the Pond said, simplicity really is best. Organization on a "scale" that humans can actually understand and exercise some control over. The way it used to be before guys like Friedman came along with their grandiose, half-understood nonsense. Of which there appears to be more in the pipeline.