On February 23, 2016
© By John Arkelian
Vaclav Havel said, “Systems are there to serve people, not the other way around.” Well, the truth is that our political and economic systems no longer serve the interest of ‘the 99 percent.’ For years now, we’ve heard the mantra of the system’s new idols: Out-sourcing, down-sizing, industry rationalization, de-regulation, free trade, corporate concentration, mergers, wanton speculation by banks and stock markets, and globalization. Our political and economic leaders tell us that those things are inevitable. It’s progress, they say. And not just inevitable. We’re also soothed by assurances that such policies are good for us. Sure, we’re told, there may be painful transitions for some; but, in the end, we’ll all be better off for the changes. In fact, globalization and its ilk are neither inevitable nor beneficial to the majority. On the contrary, most of us are extremely ill-served by policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many. We reduce or drop protective tariffs to favor freer movement of goods across national borders. Doing so certainly favors corporations: It frees them to export jobs en masse to the Third World, where labor is cheap, and where environmental standards and worker health and safety safeguards are lax. Products from China are routinely adulterated by toxins; garment workers in Bangladesh are locked inside ramshackle sweatshops, where they burn to death when fires break out – for want of the most basic safety measures.
Corporations need to be ever larger, we’re told, in order to compete more effectively in the global marketplace: In the process, we get more and more corporate concentration in fewer and fewer hands. But true competition, which is the heart of capitalism and the market economy, requires many players, not fewer. Fewer options mean a captive consumer, at the mercy of near-monopolies or cartels: The piratical fees and usurious interest rates imposed by Canadian banks, cable companies, and wireless telephone firms spring to mind. North America can’t compete with cheaper labor costs in the Third World, we’re told. The de-industrialization of the United States and Canada is progress, we’re told. Factories, nay, whole industries, that long thrived here, suddenly collapse or move offshore. (Cities, like Detroit, and sometimes, entire regions, lay destitute and ruined in the process.) And why shouldn’t industries pick up stakes and move? There’s no honor, loyalty, or patriotism in the board room, among the ranks of those callously intent on stealing our jobs. Corporations serve the profit motive and nothing else. But, it wouldn’t profit them to desert North America if they hadn’t first induced our political and opinion leaders to adopt so-called “free-trade” agreements that let them take our jobs overseas and then sell their foreign goods here without hindrance or tariff. Wander any store selling clothing, appliances, or home décor: it seems that well-nigh every product we buy in the West is now made in China (and only in China – there are no ‘made in North America’ alternatives on offer). It’s nice for them: Years of massive economic growth, a rich harvest of jobs, prosperity for many, and, for some, great wealth. But those jobs and that wealth are jobs and wealth that were scooped up from North America and transferred there. Our own ‘one-percenters’ profit from this massive transfer of jobs and wealth; everyone else in the West is robbed of employment or real growth in income. We get cheap (and often shoddy or toxically tainted) goods; but we lose our future. Unemployment rises (to levels suspected to be much higher than those admitted by official counts), while those who do manage to cling to jobs are often obliged to accept a declining standard of living. Politicians make concerned sounds about encroachments on the middle class; but they ignore the looming elephant in the room – their own unforgivable complicity in undermining the industrial might of the First World.
The West, the Western World, is the home (and guardian) of democracy, equality, inalienable human rights, the rule of law, and, something even bigger. Shall we call it civilization? In science, technology, philosophy, law, literature, music, cinema, and art, the West has no peers, not even close. For all its vaunted long-vintage as a ‘civilization’ of sorts, China has never managed to organize itself as a free and democratic society. How civilized is that? The values of its oppressive regime are antithetical to ours, yet our leaders collude in state-controlled Chinese companies buying up sections of our resource and telecommunications sectors. We transferred our wealth to them; now they are buying us out. Don’t be too proud of Western civilization, say some. There are other ways, they say. There may be other ways – ways, which in some Muslim countries, for example, legitimize misogyny and the moral effrontery known as ‘honor killing.’ Not all societies, not all so-called civilizations, are created equal. People are, yes, but not the systems that they live under. The West’s hard-earned position as the home of enlightenment and liberty is to be preferred (and, yes, trumpeted) over all the alternatives. The West is humanity’s apex. Alas, however, it is under siege – a siege from within that threatens to undermine or social cohesion, our security, and ultimately our moral compass.
Is globalization good for us? No, it is not – not unless you happen to be a member of the one-percent. Is globalization inevitable? Not, it is not. On the contrary, it is directly attributable to conscious choices made by the few and foisted on the rest of us. The fact is that the combination of the United States and Canada, even if they stood alone, constitutes a market of such vast size and (still) wealth, that it could (and should) manufacture its own goods for its own population. North America is an indispensable market. What we insist upon matters, if we will but demand what is just – not for the small wealthy minority, but for the overwhelming majority of our populace. People in North America are well-educated, hard-working, inimitably resourceful, and, most important of all, blessed with freedom. We do not shuffle and bow before potentates or tyrants. We are not cowed by the powerful. We speak our minds. We practice tolerance. We celebrate diversity. We welcome newcomers. We hold ‘the powers that be’ accountable. We hew to government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
How should we respond to globalization? By calling a halt to it. If needs be, we can build Fortress North America. ‘Autarky’ (or complete self-sufficiency) is an option for North America: With our resources, wealth, large (and highly educated) population, and endless resourcefulness, we can stand alone – and thrive, doing so – if we have to. But, we don’t stand alone: The West also comprises Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and close allies like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. What do we do? We exit the ill-advised free trade pacts that throw open our doors to foreign goods and services. In their place, we pursue ‘fair trade.’ There’s ample precedent in the near-past. The Auto Pact between the United States and Canada stipulated that American automobile manufacturers could sell cars in Canada without tariff obstacles, provided that they made a certain number of those cars in Canada. North America has the great size and strength as a market to impose such conditions upon Third World trading partners. We can also require that, as a condition precedent for reduced tariffs for goods coming into North America, Third World countries like China, India, and Bangladesh must enact and strictly enforce environmental protection laws, child labor laws, and worker health and safety laws that are as least as stringent as those that exist in North America. (There is no reasonable rationale for tolerating differential standards in such basic public interest safeguards.) We should also insist that goods being imported here originate in places where workers are paid a “fair living wage.” What constitutes a fair living wage may not be the same amount here as it is somewhere else; but it lies within our power to eliminate sweat-shop wages and to thereby partially ameliorate the labor cost differential between the developed and developing world – not by reducing wages here, but by mandating their rise elsewhere as the price for free access to our market. And, for its part, Canada should belatedly act on what has been glaringly obvious for decades: that it should make things with its resources and not just sell raw materials to others, for them to transform into finished goods and resell back to the resource producers at a higher price.
“The market economy is as natural and matter-of-fact to me as the air. After all, it is a system of human economic activity that has been tried and found to work over centuries (centuries? millennia!). It is the system that best corresponds to human nature. But precisely because it is so down-to-earth, it is not, and cannot constitute, a world view, a philosophy, or an ideology. Even less does it contain the meaning of life. It seems both ridiculous and dangerous when, for so many people… the market economy suddenly becomes a cult, a collection of dogmas, uncompromisingly defended and more important, even, than what that economic system is intended to serve – that is, life itself.”*
*Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations (translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson), Knopf Canada, 1992
John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.
Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian