James Galbraith: You Stupid Western Extractive Globalists!

Kari Polanyi Levitt observes that the word “globalization” cannot be found predating 1994. It emerged to cast a light of benign inevitability over the project of Western hegemony. Today this project has fallen short and may be teetering on the brink of its own collapse. One is China. A second is Russia. And the third is the misgovernment of finance in the United States and Europe.

The idea of the 1990s was that banks could bring democracy and prosperity to the East.

The illusions did not last long. In Russia they were already shattered by the open corruption of his re-election in 1996. The promises of prosperity faded in an orgy of privatization, asset-stripping and wage and pension theft and demographic disaster. By the late 1990s, the hoax had been openly exposed; “Western” democracy was over.

China chose a different path –found the way to social and cultural liberalization and consumer-based economics without political reform. In the mid-1990s they averted liberalization of capital controls, so that in 1997 China escaped the Asian financial crisis. Then Chinese growth in the 2000s spawned a worldwide commodities boom which sparked the economies of South American for a time and their first taste of social democracy.

Meanwhile Bush and Cheney failed in Afghanistan and Iraq showing the obsolescence and futility of modern military power. The idea that Western values were a guiding principle rather than an empty slogan. Globalization became a synonym for accepting that one country, working in its own interest and heeding no-one else, would set the terms by which the world was governed, using its military force.

The great econoic crisis of 2008 exposed the hollow foundations and virulent nature of Western finance. Incompetence led to the destruction of the great constructive project of the neoliberal age, the European Union. Wall Street followed the path of the USSR, rescued and propped up by public funding and institutions. So now we have a world made old, a tired hegemon and a fraying alliances, picking fights it cannot actually win short of nuclear war.

In Syria Russia stymied U.S. hopes for regime change. In Africa and Western Asia, China is taking charge of development engineering. China is consolidating the politics of national interests that don't wish to be further dominated by the United States. In South America for the moment, US-oriented neo-fascist regimes rising, but they cannot last long. And when the worm turns again, leaders of those Latin countries will have to ask themselves, who interferes in their political affairs, and who does not?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/notes-on-the-crisis-of-globalization

So yes the crisis of globalization will either lead to a final catastrophic war, or more likely a grand depression in the West, probably typified by a zombie oligarchical economy (like we may already have). China does not need the United States any more and Russia can forge the partnerships it needs with its geographic neighbors and near neighbors. These processes are likely to resist interruption from the outside.

For the West, having squandered its reputation for superior values, and having debased democracy before finance, and having shown disregard for the postwar structures of international law sits on the sidelines and fumes in futility and disgrace. It's time for bitter humility and see the infirmed delusion of globalization as it was conceived twenty years ago byfoolish people. Time for something sustainable, constructive and inclusive... what a cray thought that would be !! Urgent social, resource and climate challenges measures are needed... no, they are demanded immediately !!

Peace On The STEEM Blockchain @ClumsySilverDad

(content paraphrased from James Galbraith)