His statement suggests a number of questions: What is globalization? Where did it come from? Where is it heading? What does it mean to ordinary people in different parts of the world? What does it mean for national sovereignty, and for constitutional democracy? Whose interests does it serve? Why does the world's most powerful leader say that even he has no choice about it? Is globalization really inevitable?

Free markets: myth and reality the robber-baron era
At the heart of globalization is the doctrine of free markets. This doctrine, enunciated most clearly in 1776 by the Scotsman Adam Smith, came to dominate the Western world in the nineteenth century⁽¹⁾. Economists called it "laissez-faire capitalism", and philosophers justified it as "social Darwinism". Smith spoke of market forces as an "invisible hand". If each person and each business acts in self-interest, then a kind of "invisible hand" will, theoretically, guide the overall economy to society's best advantage. As numerous buyers and sellers each seek their best advantage, the overall economy will naturally optimize itself, leading to the most efficient use of resources and effort.

There was, however, an all-important proviso: Smith's analysis required that society provide sufficient guidance -- market regulation -- to ensure fair and open competition. If monopolies are allowed to arise, he said, they upset the workings of the invisible hand and they amount to a form of tyranny. For the "invisible hand" of the market to work for societal benefit, government must provide an overseeing "guiding hand" in the form of regulation and anti-monopoly enforcement.

People of the same trade seldom meet together... but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations⁽²⁾

Howard Zinn, in A People's History of the United States, provides a comprehensive account of the American experience of this era. In his chapter, "Robber Barons and Rebels", he writes:

[John Pierpont Morgan] linked railroads to one another, all of them to banks, banks to insurance companies. By 1900, he controlled 100,000 miles of railroad, half the country's mileage⁽³⁾.

The Standard Oil Company, by 1899, was a holding company which controlled the stock of many other companies.The capital was $110 million, the profit was $45 million a year, and John D. Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $200 million. Before long he would move into iron, copper, coal, shipping, and banking (Chase Manhattan Bank). Profits would be $81 million a year, and the Rockefeller fortune would total two billion dollars⁽⁴⁾.

Monopolies were both "horizontal" -- dominating a particular market -- and "vertical" -- controlling the sources of supply and the channels of distribution. Leland Stanford's Southern Pacific Railroad inspected the business records of merchants, and adjusted their freight rates accordingly -- turning the principle of "all the traffic will bear" into a matter of detailed accounting⁽⁵⁾.

The consequences of the laissez-faire doctrine "on the ground" -- in terms of general social conditions -- were horrendous. It was a time of poverty and squalor, boom-and-bust economic cycles, and grievous exploitation of workers⁽⁶⁾. Young children toiled long hours in factories under dangerous conditions. Working conditions for adults were no better, wages were low, and there was rarely compensation paid for workers injured or killed on the job. A constant flow of new immigrants created an excess of labor, helping to keep wages low.

Britain was another bulwark of laissez-faire doctrine. During the Irish Famine of the 1840's, while hundreds of thousands were starving, Britain refused on principle to provide assistance: such assistance would interfere, said the British Government, with market forces. Meanwhile, British landowners exported tons of food daily from Irish ports⁽⁷⁾.

The conditions of the laissez-faire era were so deplorable in the West that massive popular movements arose against the excesses of capitalist domination, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth⁽⁸⁾. Labor unions, socialist movements, and reformist groups fought vigorously for higher wages and better working conditions, recognition of union legitimacy, the busting up of monopolies and trusts, regulation of banking and industry, and the reform of government. Some responses to capitalist excesses were more radical. In the early years of the twentieth century, communist and anarchist movements arose in Italy, Spain, and Germany. In reaction, fascist movements gained strength, leading to fascist governments in those countries in the twenties and thirties, and contributing eventually to the outbreak of World War II.

By the time Word War II was over, the laissez-faire doctrine was in universal disrepute in the West. Reform movements in the United States, Britain, and France emerged from the war with renewed strength, and postwar Western policies brought a strong "guiding hand" to both domestic and international capitalism -- as Adam Smith had insisted was necessary, and as John Maynard Keynes and others rediscovered. Competition was re-introduced where monopoly had prevailed, and many of the reforms which workers and others had fought for were implemented⁽⁹⁾.

Postwar prosperity and the Crisis of Democracy
In the West, the postwar era was one of prosperity and social progress. In the US, there were the gains brought by Roosevelt's New Deal of the thirties, and when the war was over, returning soldiers received educational and housing subsidies. The US had effective labor protections, anti-trust legislation, regulated industry, stabilized finances, a Social Security pension program, and an economic policy aimed at general prosperity and low unemployment⁽¹⁰⁾. The savings and loan industry was established to make home ownership available to millions. In France, the Front Populaire (1936-38) had already achieved considerable social gains⁽¹¹⁾. In postwar Britain and Europe extensive social programs were implemented, including free health care, housing assistance, and government operation of transport and utilities. Corporate profits were strong, and corporate taxes helped maintain strong and healthy national budgets. Western prosperity seemed to be climbing ever-upward, and the prosperity was being shared by large segments of the population -- particularly the burgeoning middle classes⁽¹²⁾.

By 1948, the Bretton Woods agreements had led to a stable international financial system, backed up by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)⁽¹³⁾. Major currencies were given fixed exchange rates to the dollar, and the dollar was fixed at $35 per ounce of gold. Western nations enforced controls over the flows of capital across their borders, and the IMF and World Bank acted as flywheels to stabilize international finance. The Bretton Woods arrangements served as a "guiding hand" to the global economy, and the hyper-inflation and currency collapses which followed World War I were avoided, at least in the West.

In the postwar era it seemed that capitalist and popular interests had achieved a mutually beneficial political arrangement in the West. With this friendlier version of capitalism, one might have expected Western populations to be grateful and content. But at the crest of Western popular prosperity and well being, in the sixties and seventies, massive movements arose against what was called "the establishment". In the US, the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War, environmental, and "New Left" movements gained strength and threatened to upset the political balance that maintained the established order⁽¹⁴⁾. In Europe, "1968" took its place with "1848" as a climactic milestone of popular rebellion⁽¹⁵⁾.

Many Middle- and upper-class youths, the prime beneficiaries of postwar prosperity, championed or supported these protest movements. They questioned the actions of their governments, the organization of their societies and even the motives of their elders. Those elders -- who still commanded the heights -- reacted with shock and anger. And perhaps as well with fear.

Abraham Maslow (1908-70), with his "hierarchy of needs", can perhaps help explain this postwar youth rebellion. According to his observations and research, people must have their basic needs satisfied before they pay much attention to their higher needs⁽¹⁶⁾. The most basic needs are physiological, such as for food and sleep. After that comes security, membership in family or group, and self-esteem and recognition. Only after those are all satisfied are people likely to worry about their highest needs, which Maslow described as "self-actualization".

The prosperous and rebellious youth of the sixties were raised in the postwar era. Unlike their parents, who had lived through depression and war, they rarely had to worry about their basic needs. They were the first Western generation, since industrialization at least, where a majority was able to indulge themselves with "self-actualization"⁽¹⁷⁾. And, significantly, they were a generation that had been raised on the grand rhetoric of justice, universal democracy, the end of imperialism, and the defeat of dictatorship. As they entered adulthood, they saw instead racism, a war against a backward nation in Southeast Asia, an impoverished third world, governments dominated by militarism, and other perceived wrongs and injustices.

Apparently, the youth of the sixties believed fervently in the rhetoric they had been raised on, and given the freedom to "self-actualize", they seemed determined to make the rhetoric come true. Some chose to "drop out" and indulge in personal "self-actualization", but many others became politically active. Northern "Freedom Riders" risked their lives to assist the Civil Rights movement in the American South. Students held strikes and "teach ins", and physically attacked university facilities that were associated with militarism. Counselling networks were set up in the US to help young people understand their rights as war protesters and learn how they could avoid being sent to Vietnam. Globally popular entertainers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez developed the protest-song genre, and sang out blistering moral attacks on racism, exploitation, and military adventurism.

These kinds of activism, largely non-violent, created a potential crisis for the capitalist system, as the youth generation grew up and eventually would become a voting majority. If they retained their idealism, and their rejection of materialist values, it did not bode well for maximizing capitalist growth and development. Elite planners took note of this crisis. In 1975, Samuel P. Huntington, an esteemed member of the influential Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, offered his analysis in his contribution to a book called The Crisis of Democracy⁽¹⁸⁾.

According to Huntington, democratic societies "cannot work" unless the citizenry is "passive". The "democratic surge of the 1960s" represented an "excess of democracy", which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their "traditional policies", both domestic and foreign. His notion of "traditional policies" is expressed in the following passage:

To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's "Establishment."⁽¹⁹⁾

The warning that comes across clearly from a reading of The Crisis of Democracy is that some people with access to the center of power now understand that the change in popular attitudes toward government will necessitate a rapid dismantling of the whole structure of liberal democracy⁽²⁰⁾.

Note: "Liberal" has nearly opposite meanings in the US and Europe. The European sense of "liberal" is similar in meaning to the American term "conservative", while the American Heritage dictionary defines "liberal" as "political views or policies that favor civil liberties, democratic reforms, and the use of governmental power to promote social programs". Wolfe uses the American sense of the word. The term "neoliberal", of European origin, is essentially a synonym for "laissez-faire" -- the doctrine of unregulated free markets.

Not every idea generated by elite think tanks is adopted as policy, but there is considerable evidence that Huntington's Crisis of Democracy thesis reflected, or became, an elite consensus -- particularly in the US and Britain. Since his article was published in 1975, there have been several radical shifts in Western policy, each of which has served either to undermine democratic institutions, to disempower elected governments, or to dismantle the structures of society itself. These policy shifts are in fact rapidly "dismantling of the whole structure of liberal democracy", and they amount to no less than a conspiratorial betrayal of Western citizens and their constitutions.

The destabilization of Western societies
One of the post-1975 policy shifts was the destabilization of the Bretton Woods arrangements⁽²²⁾. Already in 1971 US President Nixon had taken the US off the gold standard, removing the underpinning of Western monetary stability. Following that, exchange rates were allowed to float, and currency speculation became a profitable venture. Western nations began to relinquish their controls over capital flows and "offshore tax havens" came into existence. The system of international finance became unregulated, unstable, and speculative. Bretton Wood's "guiding hand" was removed from the global economy, and control over international finance was effectively transferred from elected governments to private banks, investors, and speculators.

A global speculation market developed which is now many times larger than the global commercial economy. In what amounts to a pyramid scheme, money is created by leveraged speculative transactions in great quantities, so great that most national treasuries are dwarfed in comparison. As was demonstrated in Southeast Asia, this unregulated system can destroy reasonably sound and productive national economies almost overnight⁽²³⁾.

A second shift was the acceleration of "disinvestment" from Western economies -- the shift of Western capital from domestic to offshore production facilities. This disinvestment was greatly facilitated by the breakdown of Bretton Wood's stabilizing regime. Capital could now be more readily moved overseas, and profits could be shielded from taxation by clever use of offshore tax havens and by other stratagems that became possible when Bretton Wood's "guiding hand" was removed. Although offshore production offered some price advantages to Western consumers, most of the benefit went to corporate shareholders⁽²⁴⁾.

For corporations, disinvestment meant lower wage costs, fewer taxes, and a soaring bottom line. When production moved offshore, the domestic workers were laid off, leaving them unemployed and reducing tax revenues. Due to tax-avoidance stratagems, the increased corporate profits did not bring a counter-balancing increase in tax revenues. The net effect was a strain on national budgets and increased deficits. Reduction of domestic production increased dependency on imports and simultaneously reduced exports, pushing the balance of payments downward. For Western society generally, increased disinvestment brought unemployment, weakened economies, and increased budgetary deficits. Disinvestment represented a reversal of the postwar full-employment, universal-prosperity agenda⁽²⁵⁾.

While disinvestment was a gradual process, and the removal of Bretton Wood's "guiding hand" received little public attention, a much more dramatic shift came in 1980, with the successful campaigns of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Under the popular rhetoric of "smaller government" and "economic reform", the old, failed, laissez-faire policies were re-introduced.The history of the previous century was forgotten, along with the reasons why social programs and regulation had been introduced in the first place. All the credit for existing prosperity was given to capitalism, now referred to fondly in the corporate-controlled media as the "efficient private sector". The regulation and social reforms which had stabilized capitalism and made it more bearable were re-defined to be "government interference". "Reform", in an Orwellian reversal, came to mean the dismantlement of reform⁽²⁶⁾.

The flagship policies of this new regime were referred to in official rhetoric as privatization, deregulation, and reform. Privatization, which applied primarily in Britain -- the US had always been largely privatized -- meant that the government began to sell off infrastructures to private investors at bargain prices -- infrastructures which had been developed at considerable public expense. Consumers typically gained some immediate benefits from these transactions, but the promised "benefits of the market" were greatly exaggerated. In the rhetoric, the benefits of better-managed operations, it seemed, would go directly to the consumer. In fact, as public services were taken over by private monopolies, "efficiency" turned out to mean the downsizing of workforces, reductions in quality and reliability, and cut-backs in infrastructure investment. Apart from some initial price cuts to consumers, the benefits went mainly to corporate stockholders and to corporate executives, who received immense bonuses for their bold "efficiency" measures⁽²⁷⁾.

British Rail was privatized, fragmenting an efficient nationwide network into a hodgepodge of private operations, each an effective monopoly in its market⁽²⁸⁾. Railtrack owns the tracks themselves, while the running stock is owned by the various rail operators. Rail safety has declined, which Railtrack blames on the operators, while the operators point the finger of blame back to Railtrack. Different operators make changes to their schedules at different times, making it difficult for travellers to obtain reliable information. Trains are sometimes cancelled without notice, and overall reliability has steadily declined. Stockholders demand higher profits, leading to under-staffing and inadequate attention to long-term maintenance. As public dissatisfaction mounts, media coverage focuses on particular cases of mismanagement, but never questions the fundamental wisdom of privatization.

Deregulation meant that decades of stabilizing regulations -- the "guiding hand" -- were rapidly removed, with predictable results. Merger-mania erupted, as firms sought to leverage their way toward monopolistic dominance. Industries which had been isolated by regulatory barriers, such as America's savings and loan industry, became vulnerable to looting by operators eager to siphon off their assets into more lucrative investments. Conservatively and responsibly run firms, such as California's Louisiana Pacific Lumber company, could be raided by junk-bond speculators, with their assets either sold off, or else developed recklessly in order to generate the short-term revenue necessary to pay off the junk-bond debt. The "economic growth" experienced under deregulation has had more to do with the gathering of markets into fewer hands -- the incredibly profitable TNC's -- than with the generation of productive economic activity⁽²⁹⁾.

Reform, besides referring to generic compliance with a laissez-faire agenda, also meant reducing the taxes of corporations and the wealthy, increasing subsidies to corporations, eliminating social services, backtracking on labor rights, and generally cutting back the beneficial functions of government. This agenda represents a wholesale transfer of assets, revenues, and power from elected governments to corporations, leaving governments and societies impoverished and disenfranchised⁽³⁰⁾.

This dramatic policy shift was known in the US as the "conservative revolution", while in Europe it came to be known as the "neoliberal revolution". It spread to the rest of the West, and beyond, and became a central part of the globalization process. It was originally seen as a radical political initiative in 1980, but by the end of the decade it had become the dominant political doctrine in the West. In 1991, with the signing of the fiscally conservative Maastricht Treaty, Europe was committed to a "neoliberal" economic future⁽³¹⁾.

But of all these historic shifts in Western policy that have followed the publication of The Crisis of Democracy, perhaps the most significant has been the "free-trade" revolution. Free trade had been a nominal part of Western policy ever since the GATT agreement was signed in 1948. But in 1995, in the Uruguay Round of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created. GATT had been a treaty; the WTO is a membership organization, with a permanent bureaucracy centralized in Geneva.

A description of the World Trade Organization and the other institutions of globalization, and indeed an encyclopedic coverage of globalization in all its aspects, can be found in The Case Against the Global Economy, and for a Turn Toward the Local, an excellent anthology edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith⁽³²⁾. In the chapter "Mechanisms of Corporate Rule", Tony Clarke describes the WTO as follows:

The new World Trade Organization established by the Uruguay Round of GATT is designed, in effect, to serve as a global governing body for transnational corporate interests. The WTO will have both a legislative and judicial powers and a mandate to eliminate all barriers to international investment and competition.

...the world's major TNCs [transnational corporations] will have a powerful role to play in the new WTO through direct linkages with the trade representatives of participating countries. In the case of the United States, for example, members of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations include such corporate giants as IBM, AT&T, Bethlehem Steel, Time Warner, Corning, Bank of America, American Express, Scott Paper, Dow Chemical, Boeing, Eastman Kodak, Mobil Oil, Amoco, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard, Weyerhauser, and General Motors...⁽³³⁾

"Free-trade zone" agreements, such as the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), go even further. While under the WTO one nation can take an action against another, under NAFTA, a corporation can undertake an action against a nation. In a recent case, the US-based Ethyl Corporation took an action against Canada, which had banned the chemical MMT when scientists found it to be a dangerous neurotoxin⁽³⁶⁾. Ethyl claimed this was a case of "trade discrimination". Faced with the expense of fighting the action, and given the corporate domination of the NAFTA bureaucracy, Canada capitulated. The ban on MMT was overturned, and Canada agreed to pay $13 million in compensation to Ethyl. The scientific evidence had not changed, but it was irrelevant to the overall policy-making process. A "free-trade zone", perhaps, would be better named a "corporate-rule zone".

Western leaders have recently been pushing forward a new treaty which would extend NAFTA-like provisions to most of the world. Under the terms of the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investments), any corporation which does business in more than one country could bring an action against any nation on the basis of "investment discrimination"⁽³⁷⁾. This could be used to overturn environmental protections, fishing limits, safety regulations, worker rights, product quality laws, and any number of measures which could be interpreted -- by a panel of corporate representatives in their secret MAI hearings -- as being "discriminatory" against an investor's "right" to maximize profits.

If the MAI isn't adopted -- the negotiations are currently stalled -- there are contingency plans in the works. There have been discussions of implementing MAI-like provisions through other channels, such as the IMF⁽³⁸⁾. And there has been talk of a huge new "free-trade zone" that would bind together Europe and North America, allowing corporations to bring actions against the EU or its member states⁽³⁹⁾.

The global regime: world tyranny and global devastation
What is called "free trade progress" has actually been the quiet transfer of sovereignty -- over a broad range of policies -- from elected governments to corporate-dominated commissions such as NAFTA and the WTO. This transfer of sovereignty has been a low profile operation. The powerful but faceless commissions are rarely mentioned in the corporate-owned mass media, only occasionally written about in corporate-owned newspapers, and most people are unaware of the degree to which the traditional powers of nations have already been signed away. Largely unnoticed, a corporate-dominated global regime is being consolidated, and legal precedents for its authority -- such as the actions against Canada and the EU -- are being quietly but firmly established.

Besides the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, there is also the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Each of these centralized bureaucracies is dominated by corporate interests and adheres to a neoliberal, free-trade agenda. While the WTO achieves its authority through free-trade treaties, the IMF wields similar power by attaching conditions to the loans which it grants. With the OECD serving as a global elite think-tank, setting longer-range policy guidelines, this collection of institutions has become in all but name an official world government⁽⁴⁰⁾.

In the poor countries of the third world, in the former Soviet Union, and in the former tiger-economies of Southeast Asia, this de facto global regime has shown that it can act with utter ruthlessness. Austerity programs for the masses, bailout programs for corporations and investors, and destabilization programs for national economies -- these have characterized the actions of the IMF⁽⁴¹⁾. But in the West, the global regime has been relatively inactive -- except for a few carefully chosen test cases. Thus most of us in the West have little idea how much our societies have already been undermined. Why is the power of the WTO and NAFTA being held back? Why aren't they being used wholesale to overthrow environmental laws, worker protections, etc.?

There is a popular anecdote about cooking frogs. If you throw a frog into boiling water, according to the anecdote, it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water, and gradually heat it up, it won't realize what's happening, and will allow itself to be boiled to death. Whether or not this applies to real frogs, it seems to be an apt metaphor for the situation Western citizens now find themselves in. Our societies are being dismantled from around us. But instead of one great conflagration, which might cause us to protest, the dismantlement is happening in stages, and it is happening largely behind the scenes. The relative inactivity of the WTO and NAFTA, it seems, is nothing more than shrewd political timing.

Nonetheless, Western society is being dismantled at an alarming rate, with the US leading the trend and with Britain close behind. In the two dozen or so years since Crisis of Democracy was published in 1975, the Bretton Woods "guiding hand" has been removed from international finance, and neoliberalism has become the dominant global doctrine. In the West, corporate tax reductions have impoverished national budgets, national infrastructures have been privatized, social programs have been dismantled, and governments have signed away their sovereign powers to corporate-dominated commissions⁽⁴²⁾. If Western society were to be dismantled any faster, people might notice and become alarmed.

In the nineteenth century laissez-faire era, capitalist interests reigned supreme in the West, but they did so within the context of sovereign nation states. Over time, using the political process of the nation state, people were able to achieve victories against corporate power, culminating in the social gains of the postwar years. Now once again, capitalist interests reign supreme -- only this time in the context of globalization. What the free-trade treaties do, ultimately, is lock in capitalist hegemony.

As long as Western governments continue to dismantle themselves voluntarily, and give corporations a free hand, there's little need for the full power of the globalist regime to be unleashed. But if political sentiment in the West were to mount against laissez-faire policies, as they did in the robber-baron era, then the de-facto world government in Geneva is established, and is fully prepared to set economic and social policies for the whole globe⁽⁴³⁾. Meanwhile, globalization brings a return of the abuses of the nineteenth century, but greatly magnified.

In the nineteenth century, it was national economies that were being integrated and monopolized -- by colorful robber barons. Today, it is the global economy that is being integrated and monopolized -- by faceless transnational corporations. In the robber-baron days in the US, as many of the individual states began to implement regulatory reform, political influence at the federal level was used to overrule state regulations⁽⁴⁴⁾. Today, many Western nations still have strong regulations in effect, and corporate political influence is being concentrated at the global level, where those national regulations can be eventually overruled. Once again "free competition" is the myth while concentration of wealth and power is the reality.

In the early eighties, while Reagan and Thatcher were re-introducing laissez-faire policies and beginning the dismantlement of Western societies, the IMF and World Bank began a similar program on a global scale. Instead of acting as stabilizing flywheels, they began using their power to destroy national economies and to impose laissez-faire policies on nations that didn't want them. Loans to third-world countries started to come with structural adjustment programs attached, whose effect was to dismantle third-world societies at a much faster rate than was occurring in the West. In both Somalia and Rwanda, for example, structural-adjustment programs destabilized the economy and devastated domestic food production, leading to famine and civil war.

Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, is an insider to the operations of the IMF, and has extensive contacts in the various non-governmental organizations that operate throughout the third world. In his recent landmark book, The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, he documents the policy considerations and consequences of IMF programs in Somalia, Rwanda, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Russia and the former Yugoslavia⁽⁴⁵⁾. He presents a very strong case that the devastating destabilizations that occurred in each of these countries, as a result of IMF policies, were completely intentional -- achieving goals such as "eliminating the poor", creating markets for large Western agribusiness operators, and removing third-world products from glutted global markets.

As disease and famine infest the third-world, market forces are offered by capitalism as the prescribed solution, just as they were in the nineteenth century. And once again coffee and beef plantations, for example, export tons of products daily from the same countries which are experiencing famine -- thus the scenario of the Irish famine is repeated around the world. In 1986 Brazil was the world's second-largest food exporter, while 86 million Brazilians did not have enough to eat. India ranks among the largest third-world food exporters, while 300 million Indians go hungry⁽⁴⁶⁾.

The rhetoric of free markets is used to justify exploitation of those at the bottom, while at the same time giant corporations exempt themselves from the harshness of free-market discipline. They instead avail themselves of government subsidies, lucrative government contracts, expensive bail-outs, and favored tax treatment⁽⁴⁷⁾. An investment fund for billionaires, "Long Term Capital Management", got in trouble recently due to its own unwise gambling in the markets. The US Federal Reserve quickly and quietly organized a $3.5 billion bail-out fund⁽⁴⁸⁾.

In the Southeast Asia bail-out, the IMF rescue funds did not go into the Korean treasury, nor any national treasury, but were paid to the speculators and investors whose activities had helped cause the collapse. The IMF is funded by Western taxpayers; these funds were transferred to wealthy speculators and investors; the loans must be repaid by the taxpayers of Southeast Asia -- thus money is channeled from both Western and non-Western populations into corporate coffers. And instead of helping Southeast Asia to get back on its feet, the IMF forced operationally healthy businesses into bankruptcy and presided over the dismantlement of economies.

In the West, unemployment is not only accepted but embraced as a defense against inflation. Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, praises "fear" -- the fear of being fired -- as a desirable component of a stable economy. Real wages decline as workers are forced to give back gains achieved in years of union power, are made "redundant", or are "downsized" into less rewarding or temporary jobs. Small farmers are forced out of business, and into unemployment, as bank lending policies and market forces favor ever-larger agribusiness operations. Meanwhile, corporate profits skyrocket⁽⁴⁹⁾.

Commerce, trade, and finance are being monopolized on a global scale, with ownership in each business segment, from communications to food to transport, being concentrated into the hands of a few TNC's⁽⁵⁰⁾. These immense conglomerate empires, with their single-minded dedication to never-ending growth, are like a cancer -- their unrestrained development projects are destroying societies and the life-support systems of the Earth itself. Ozone depletion, global warming, overuse of pesticides, destruction of topsoils and rainforests, clearcut logging, pollution of air and water, exhaustion of fisheries -- these trends threaten the survival of humanity and they are being accelerated by so-called economic growth⁽⁵¹⁾. Under globalization, capitalism has grown beyond the point where even a"guiding hand" could correct its excesses. Unlimited growth is simply not possible forever in a finite world.

Most of us in the West don't realize how close we are to living under an official corporate global government, one with no popular representation, no bill of rights, and whose only god is market forces. The eighteenth-century Western monarchies became twentieth-century republics -- will the new millennium return us to tyranny, but on a global scale? And, as citizens, is our only recourse to wait and see?

Globalization represents a dire crisis for constitutional democracy, the sovereignty of republics, human well being, and the very survival of life as we know it on the planet. But in crisis there lies opportunity as well as danger. The very abuses and excesses which are rising to the surface under globalization create the seeds of a global counter-movement. As more and more people come to realize that the future promises only increased suffering, there is hope that they will rise up in solidarity to build together a better world.

This book is dedicated to that hope. Part I raises the alarm; Part II articulates a vision of a better world; Part III shows a strategy for attaining it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
- US Declaration of Independence (1776)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead⁽⁵²⁾