Politics & Global Corporatization
<Caveat:>
I've always steered away from politics — being a math
major in college and a programmer for 32 years makes me far
prefer questions that actually have answers. Any political
posts that I make here tend to take a slightly naive,
very idealistic, and moderately long-term view of the
situations.
</Caveat:>
Given my general distaste for political discussions,
it's been odd for me to run across three different but
somewhat interconnected items about Global
Corporatization, the unipolar world, and a bit
of US foreign policy history — the odd bit being
that I found all three very interesting.
It's refreshing to read some writing that
makes ya think.
-
Arundhati Roy talk in Santa Fe, and conversation with Howard Zinn.
I do not agree completely with what she says and how she
says it — e.g, one-sided Israeli history that omits
the Arab attacks that led directly to the 1967 expansion.
-
Fareed Zakaria Article from New Yorker Magazine
that mentions the word
Realpolitik three times.
- "The Alarm!", a
local Santa Cruz area free political paper. Might be
described as somewhat leftist. Oooh, their website seems to
be completely empty. HAVE THEY BEEN SILENCED?
(Fodder for conspiracy buffs.)
My main point in the rest of this article:
Corporations are not democracies,
and in fact the recent vast increases in corporate
power undermine democratic rule, in part because of
their effect of concentrating wealth.
My second point:
The "anti-globalization movement" should really do
their damnedest to get that name changed.
That's just exceptionally poor marketing.
I have always found absurdity in the silly protests against
globalization. Globalization (in, yeah, yeah, yeah, Lennon's
"imagine no country" terms) is IMHO utterly inevitable given
a global communications system. It is a global economy.
There remain artificial national boundaries, but given enough
communication among peoples in different parts of the world,
those people will eventually obliterate those boundaries.
I am refreshed to see Roy being careful to distinguish the
problem as Corporate globalization. IMHO, that's not even
actually an accurate way to put it. The problem is
Global Corporatization.
"We" (the US public, as directed, cajoled, and exhorted by the
corporate media) oversimplify our political views into ONE BIT.
(LEFT or RIGHT. Liberal or Conservative.) See the
"World's Smallest Political Quiz for a slightly
less oversimplified view. (There's an omitted tangent here,
on Libertarianism GONE TOO FAR).
"We" also oversimplify our views of governmental systems
versus economic systems.
E.g., Communism, in its "ideal" form (i.e., if there were
a population that would "play nice"), is attractive as an
economic system (though not workable in the real world),
but it is not a system of government and the
attempts to make it so have almost all failed economically.
Similarly, the public in the US are currently confused between
democracy (a form of government) and Corporatization
(an emphatically non-democratic form of economic system).
We are told by the (corporate) media that the two must go hand-in-hand,
and that the corporate form of the Free Market is the only form
that can exist in a democracy. Bullshit.
10:09:01 AM
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