Majorityrights Central > Category: Globalisation

by Martin Hutchinson

The extraordinary rise in commodity prices, at the beginning of a global cyclical upswing, is beginning to reorder the pecking order of the world economy. Together with the advances made by China and India in the last decade, it is producing an entirely new world order, which many will find uncomfortable. In it, commodities, derided for decades as unimportant, have become scarce resources, to be guarded and managed with the utmost care. Conversely human labor and skill, on the basis of which the glories of human civilization were built, is entering into a state of gigantic glut.

The current commodities boom is qualitatively different from those of the past. In previous commodities booms, such as those of 1972-73 or 2006-08, the global economy was operating close to capacity, and indeed the boom was an important indicator that full capacity was about to be reached. The booms were accompanied by wage inflation and in both cases resulted in price inflation, although in 2007-08 the price inflation was aborted by the financial crash before it could really get hold.

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At his blog Simon Darby has uploaded the first of two videos of Nick Griffin speaking to camera after the Copenhagen failure.  I can’t embed it here yet, but this is the link.

I will add the link to the second video when it is available.

Here it is.

by K R Bolton
Academy of Social and Political Research

Multicultural politics, including that concerned with immigration, is a method of social engineering. Whoever raises a voice in public in opposition or even merely of caution is pilloried as a “racist” and a “reactionary”. Conversely, those who champion multiculturalism are upheld as the paragons of ‘progress’ and humanitarianism. Yet behind the moral façade multiculturalism is a cynical stratagem, an important part of the process of globalisation in the interests of a small, self-appointed plutocratic elite. This essay examines how multiculturalism is an aspect of globalisation.

“See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist - just because it’s anti-human. And race is, in fact, a human characteristic - there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced - that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”
Noam Chomsky

It is ironic that an intellectual championed in particular by the anarchist-Left has given such a cogent definition of the motivating force behind multiculturalism. Among the numerous references to Chomsky made by the Left his diagnosis of capitalism as being “anti-racist” because it aims to create a society of humans as nothing more than “interchangeable cogs”, does not receive the same attention as his other views. As Chomsky states, individuals cannot function at an optimum level as producers and consumers if there are racial or what we might further categorise as cultural and national, divisions.

Chomsky is outside the mainstream of Leftist ideology, which sees humanity and the individual in precisely the same terms as capitalism sees humanity as defined by Chomsky in the above passage. Both capitalism and Marxism are globalist, and both are reductionist in seeing economic factors as the primary determinants of human behaviour and history.  Marx himself was not adverse to Free Trade capitalism. He supported Free Trade insofar as he saw it as a dialectical catalyst for the destruction of national boundaries, which would internationalise “the proletariat” and eventually lead to a global system. Global capitalists maintain the same outlook today. Marx’s analysis in regard to Free Trade was correct, although his alternative is nothing more than to change the ownership of production and distribution. Marx said of Free Trade:

“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the modern of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish faster.”

Today’s global corporate executives and planners concur with Marx. Marx further identified “protectionism” as the conservative position, Free Trade as subversive and revolutionary. Those – mainly political scientists and journalists, especially in the English-speaking world – who insist on defining “conservatism” (sic) as Free Trade liberalism, should return to an actual source; in this instance Marx, to re-evaluate their definitions:

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It seems impossibly fanciful, almost like a script for a Bond movie.  A clutch of mega-corporations hatches a plan for the global control of an absolute fundamental for life itself: food.  The plan calls not simply for the global domination of food supply, but for placing Nature beyond the law so farmers and growers must buy their seeds from the corporations.  And because those seeds are genetically manipulated to produce barren plants, they must do it afresh every drilling season.

Cue the suave, unkillable good guy who always steals the villain’s very delectable girlfriend?  ‘Fraid not this time.  It’s down to freedom-loving Americans to save the world from predatory capitalism, with maybe some help from Ron Paul.  There’s about a week left in which to inform Congress about right and wrong as they pertain to this bill.

From that last link (Campaign for Liberty):-

Pay special attention to
Section 3 which is the definitions portion of the bill-read in it’s entirety.
section 103, 206 and 207- read in it’s entirety.
Red flags I found and I am sure there are more…........
Legally binds state agriculture depts to enforcing federal guidelines effectively taking away the states power to do anything other than being food police for the federal dept.
Effectively criminalizes organic farming but doesn’t actually use the word organic.
Effects anyone growing food even if they are not selling it but consuming it.
Effects anyone producing meat of any kind including wild game. 
Legislation is so broad based that every aspect of growing or producing food can be made illegal.  There are no specifics which is bizarre considering how long the legislation is.  
Section 103 is almost entirely about the administrative aspect of the legislation.  It will allow the appointing of officials from the factory farming corporations and lobbyists, and classify them as experts and allow them to determine and interpret the legislation.  Who do you think they are going to side with?  
Section 206 defines what will be considered a food production facility and what will be enforced up all food production facilities.  The wording is so broad based that a backyard gardener could be fined and more.
Section 207 requires that the state’s agriculture dept act as the food police and enforce the federal requirements.  This takes away the states’ power and is in violation of the 10th Amendment.

An MR reader sent me the following clip, which is actually of a guy reading an Op-ed News article titled “Monsanto’s Dream Bill”:-

The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard published a pretty hard-hitting article today, filled with lurid references to nations in deep financial crisis.  Those I have heard so much of since September 2008, I am rapidly developing an incapacity to be alarmed.  No, the interesting thing about this article was the following stunning admission of where things will go:-

The sums needed are beyond the limits of the IMF, which has already bailed out Hungary, Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus, Iceland, and Pakistan – and Turkey next – and is fast exhausting its own $200bn (€155bn) reserve.  We are nearing the point where the IMF may have to print money for the world, using arcane powers to issue Special Drawing Rights.

Forget monetary reform of fractional reserve banking (which allows banks to create a nation’s money-supply as debt out of thin air).  You, Ron Paul and everyone who didn’t lose billions out of the crisis may think that restoring the right of democratic nations to coin their currency directly, as required in the US Constitution, is the answer.  But we are, Evans-Pritchard says, going to get a global fiat currency.  The EU agrees, and at the end of last month formally presented a case for a global currency system to the new American administration.

Now, at a time like this there should always be a gentleman born to Jewish parents who can be found leading the intellectual charge.  And, as it happens, there is.  The economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank and author of Making Globalization Work, has been the point man for the global currency.  Here he is being interviewed by some outfit named Share the World’s Resources:-

Q: Are you saying that we would need a “currency basket” in order to secure stability?

A: (What is needed is) Bringing all the currencies, like the SDRs (special drawing rights), but SDRs have only been periodic. Make this more permanent.

Q: At the famous international economic conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, which established a postwar global monetary and financial order, John Maynard Keynes, who represented Britain, proposed the creation of a world currency unit called the Bancor. Are you talking about a similar type of currency basket? Would that be the kind of “basket” you had in mind?

A: Exactly, in my book I argue that that’s what we need. It’s a multilateral system. We need to have a new institutional framework and that’s why I’m hopeful that there’s the beginning of a discussion to have an international meeting, and that’s one of the things I hope will come out of that.

Q: Do you think we need a second version of the Bretton Woods conference?

A: This is a “Bretton Woods moment.”

Of course, he means “This is a Stiglitz moment.”  It is also a moment when the nation state, upon whose political existence the defence of human bio-diversity depends, takes another long step towards dissolution.

The blog has experienced a serious technical problem over the last few days, which prevented new postings.  Thankfully, James resolved it, and I’ve been pitched back into the world of political news and thought.  And what I have been trying to get a handle on has been that brief and very strange, conflicted marriage of radical leftist idealism, political establishments generally, American national interest and corporate greed which is, or was, the movement for globalisation.

I was thrust into this line of country by a news snippet two days ago about the resignation of Brazil’s political heroine and Environment Minister, Marina Silva.

“Environmental campaigners say her resignation is a major setback for the rainforest in Brazil.

“Brazil is losing the only voice in the government that spoke out for the environment,” said Sergio Leitao, director of public policy for Greenpeace in Brazil.

“The minister is leaving because the pressure on her for taking the measures she took against deforestation has become unbearable,” he added.

Economic development

Marina Silva has blamed the increasing deforestation of the Amazon on Brazilian cattle ranchers and farmers.

She had unsuccessfully opposed several government infrastructure projects in the Amazon rainforest, including two big hydroelectric dams on the River Madeira, and a major new road.

According to Brazilian media reports, she was also believed to be dismayed at the recent appointment of another minister to act as a coordinator for the government’s newly announced strategy for the Amazon.

The government’s decision to authorise genetically modified grains, and the construction of a new nuclear power plant, also went against the minister’s environmental concerns.

Correspondents say Ms Silva’s resignation will reinforce a perception that President Lula is more concerned with economic development than conservation.

What really did for her was the strongly rising cost of commodities on world markets.  Money, in other words ... and weak politicians.  These include the one-time champion of workers rights and two-times elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.  But this is the sad, too too predictable story of globalisation everywhere.

Now, let’s rewind eighteen years and see how it came to this.  It means going back to the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Anyone past his twenties will likely remember watching the whole process of revolution in the east unfold.  It was an extraordinary and breathless passage of time, the like of which we simply did not believe we would witness in our lifetimes.  Those involved, of course, knew that communism as ideology was an empty shell.  Homo sovieticus had nothing to field against the national soul of the western satellites.  But what was not known was how weak the state structure itself was.

But, also, what I never dreamt as I watched the images on the television screen was how little the hard-left in the West, which had supported the workers’ paradise throughout, was inclined to walk into history with Homo sovieticus.  Instead, it stampeded into new political causes.

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On Saturday the little big men of the World Economic Forum checked out of their Davos hotels and made the hop home in the company Gulfstream.  Along with the customary hookers and political whores, the high-powered networking and, doubtless for some, the plain high, our heroes left behind all that damned public caring - at least, for another year.

Actually, the caring thing was pretty well done this year.  They concocted a public relations exercise involving a somewhat bland question:-

What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?

There was a lot of hot air vented about knowledge and poverty, climate change, and water.  But the hot button issues among the real players were the decline of the dollar as the world currency and the threat of a US recession.  These merely reflects the corporate-heavy interests of the Davos “community”.  Of the issue of the rights and interests of real people and peoples there was, of course, no sign.  Or almost no sign.  This report appeared this morning in the lower middle-class rag, the Sunday Express:-

EUROPEANS THINK ISLAM IS DANGEROUS

AN “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.  The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years.  It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.  It reports “a growing fear among Europeans of a perceived Islamic threat to their cultural identities, driven in part by immigration from predominantly Muslim nations”.

Now, I’ve been all over the WEF’s brave new website and I can’t find a trace of the former Arch-Songster’s study.  Which is odd.  The only half-useful mention of migration which crops up via a word search on the site concerns this curious working session:-

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Here is Martin Hutchinson’s latest at Prudent Bear, quietly informing bovine optimists that globalisation carries profound and profoundly depressing implications for more than the benighted working class in the West.

Tata Motors’ emergence as front-runner to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from the ailing Ford brings one question uppermost to a commentator sitting at a wealthy Western desk: Precisely which economic sectors can be relied upon in the future to provide jobs for Westerners at wages higher than are obtainable in the Third World?  Will there continue to be opportunities to improve Western living standards, or are those living standards destined to descend to some kind of population-weighted average between Boston and Benin?

Tata is a typical and highly capable example of that new breed: the third world multinational company. Part of the multi-industry Tata Group, over a century old, from which it had access to both capital in its formative years and steel currently, it has established itself as the premier manufacturer of light trucks in India and as one of the top three automobile manufacturers. At the bottom of the market, it has announced plans to being out a 100,000 rupee (about $2,500 currently) automobile, which if successful will undercut its major competition by more than 30% and greatly expand the market for automobiles among the still impoverished Indian people.

Conventional Western business analysts have no problem with Tata manufacturing mini-cars for the Indian market, or indeed for developing country markets in Africa and elsewhere. They imagine that Tata is able to use its comparative advantage of cheaper labor to squeeze costs out of the manufacturing process, thus achieving what in the West would be an impossibly low price. They point knowingly to the expensive environmental features that the new automobile will lack, and imagine smugly that the it will be both tiny and of low quality, adequate for the noble impoverished of the Third World, but not seriously to be imagined as competition on the roads of London, New York or Stuttgart.

The announcement that Tata is to buy Land Rover and Jaguar has thus caused a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance. Land Rover and Jaguar are both icons of British automobile manufacture, hand crafted by generations of British skilled labor. Admittedly in the 1970s Jaguar’s quality control became so poor that Jaguars rivaled the Moskvich or the Yugo for frequency of repairs, but since 1979 or so quality has improved and the marque has established a cherished if not particularly profitable niche among the luxury automobiles of the world.  Moreover, would Western buyers shell out the substantial cost of a Jaguar if they knew it had been manufactured in India; after all, how could the quality be relied upon?

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