Prefatory note: The current demagoguery in the hands of globalists takes the ugly form that a citizen who believes in national borders and national priorities cannot be a good citizen – that he is a fascist some claim. We need to be reminded that the American revolution was a nationalist uprising which few would call fascist. The current sophistry in the hands of globalists belies that a citizen who is devoted to his homeland and who places the interests of his nation-state as the top priority can exist, at the same time, with a world view that is tolerant and respectful of those beyond his borders. Furthermore, to be respectful of global interests is not to suggest that those that can afford it should be forced to open their pocketbooks to fix all of the world’s ills. That suggestion is impudent and a sleight-of-hand by globalists whose own personal agendas for control stand to be upended by the rights and privileges of sovereign states. Simply stated, globalism is imperialism in sheep’s clothing. What other conclusion is there to be had when an international organization made up of unelected bureaucrats imposes its will on the citizens of member nations? That supranational organizations are anti-democratic is a statement of fact and not of ideology.

Globalists purposely conflate political globalization with its clear and direct threat to the sovereignty of nations with economic globalization which, in the main, works best when allowed to function in accordance with free-market forces. The reason for the masquerade is clear: globalists reckon that political globalization has an increased chance of coming to pass if global trade is so inextricably woven that only the supranational organization can referee its smooth sailing.

Supporters of globalization argue that the world is facing a historical inevitability: a stage that all nations must experience as they are swept away by the inexorable forces of modernity. This so-called inevitability theory is a slick rhetorical attempt to stifle debate before it has begun in earnest not in elite circles, where it is fashionable to abide the theology of globalization, but in town halls, factory floors, and chambers of congress.

Trade globalization or economic globalization has a historical cyclicality that dispels its presumed inevitability. Beginning in the middle to the late nineteenth century there have been significant oscillations in world trade using total exports as a percentage of world GDP as a barometer. To underscore this cyclicality, one has only to look at the level of trade that was conducted as the nineteenth century drew to a close to realize that such a level of trade was not seen again until the late nineteen sixties.

Globalization gets a lot of oxygen from proponents of free trade because a concept which implies freedom must obviously represent goodness for all of humankind. America’s historical experience with economic globalization, however, is decidedly different as the nation has racked up an accumulated trade deficit of approximately $10 trillion during the last four decades. Tragically, millions of workers have lost their jobs during that time, in effect, financing the trade deficit while one administration after another in Washington turned the other cheek to our trading partners who excelled at cheating through currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, import tariffs, dumping of commodities at less than cost, and prohibited commercial activities.

The current clamor which accompanied President Trump’s imposition of import tariffs on certain goods and commodities as presaging a “trade war” is disingenuous if a thinly veiled political bias against the President. To the best of my knowledge, there was no such uproar as the nation was being pummeled by one-way trade deals by friends and foes alike for decades. In effect, we have long been in a trade war albeit with one hand tied behind our backs. The trade imbalance with China is especially appalling. Of the $10 trillion trade deficit the United States has racked up, better than 50% or $5.2 trillion comes courtesy of China. That translates into a trade imbalance in goods and services of $400 billion to $500 billion a year. And, for those who argue that import tariffs are, in effect, a tax on U.S. citizens they need to sharpen their pencils. The millions of jobs lost, the depression of wages, the thousands of factory closures, the contraction of R&D, and the export of capital due to the nation’s trade imbalance has saddled citizens with a tax that makes the effect of import tariffs miniscule by comparison.

Cheerleaders for “free trade” need to be reminded that Japan would not be where it is today, sporting its global manufacturing prowess, if it had not booted American automobile manufacturers out of the country in 1939 – ostensibly for reasons of national security – so that the government could protect and finance its fledging auto industry.

According to economist Ha-Joon Chang in his book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and The Secret History of Capitalism, “…had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the 1960’s, there would have been no Lexus automobile.” Toyota Corporation as well, added Mr. Chang, might have been wiped out had it followed the free traders’ advice. Automobile import prohibitions remained in place in Japan until October, 1965. Clearly, Japan was more interested in protecting its automobile industry than in practicing “free trade.”

As far as the United States is concerned, the principal bad Samaritan on the world stage is China. It is estimated that China purloins roughly $225 billion, at the low end and as much as $600 billion at the high end, annually in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets from the United States.  In a feeble attempt to justify their misbehavior, the China Ministry of Commerce alleges that China is still a “developing” country.

Adding to China’s protectionism is a list of hundreds of products which are banned from importation including stethoscopes, refrigerators, digital cameras, video games, and television sets. And, it isn’t just products that are proscribed. On the internet front, China has built yet another Great Wall to keep companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube from operating in the country. This Wall doesn’t just aid and abet China’s censors but it limits foreign competition so that homegrown companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent can thrive in monopolistic markets. Again, so much for free trade.

WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE TO WHOM?

The globalization conceit held by world leaders in and out of government should sound an alarm to those who believe in the sanctity of democratic processes. Put simply, globalization and democracy are hardly fraternal twins. Globalists believe that globalization’s ugly side, lower wages, lost jobs, shuttered factories or devastated communities is the result of there not being enough global governance to channel all of the good that derives from globalization. And besides, globalists say, any discomfort is strictly temporary. As Mr. Pascal Lamy, former Director of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said in a recent address, “The future lies with more globalization, not less…”

The hubris of a technocrat like Mr. Lamy is lamentable but it must be rebuffed. The French – who do not want to be “out-globalized” by the Germans – are talking about bringing Europe closer “together” by harmonizing fiscal policies, setting a minimum wage in every country, and by establishing a European Union (EU) zone budget run by a finance czar.

Globalization undermines local and national boundaries thus ceding political sway to the unelected officials of supranational organizations such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations, and the EU. And, make no mistake about the fact that globalists know perfectly well that to achieve their coveted “Global Neighborhood” they need to first achieve a global economy.

It is clear that no political actor is further removed from serving citizen voters – the legions of coal miners, fishermen, tobacco growers, and grape pickers – than the self-dealing bureaucrat whose loyalty, first and foremost, is to a soulless supranational organization. Yet it is the citizen voter who by the sweat of his brow finances the mammoth spending budgets of supranational institutions. The European Parliament is notable for its excesses as it operates out of three separate locations: Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, France. Each month over 750 MEP’s – Members of the European Parliament – travel between Brussels and Strasbourg while schlepping their banker’s boxes full of documents at a cost to taxpayers of over $100 million a year. Incidentally, for all of the sermonizing by the French government against nationalist/populist movements across the continent and the United States, what are the chances that the French would agree to shut down the Strasbourg parliament location in the interest of fiscal prudence and global harmony? As a further slap to the face of the citizen voters of Europe much of the lawmaking by Parliament is done clandestinely: to speed up the process the parliamentarians protest!

According to recent statistics, the European Union budget is roughly a gargantuan $173 billion – of that total, the EU states, 6%, or $10 billion is spent for administrative purposes; The World Bank’s spending budget comes in at $4 billion; the IMF’s, a miserly $1 billion. The scale of these numbers is understandable when one considers that the headcount at the European Union is roughly 50,000, at the World Bank 10,000, and at the IMF nearly 3,000.

Many of these bureaucrats are hardly selfless civil servants as corruption runs rampant across many of these institutions. The Oil-for-Food Program of the United Nations, the inception of which was overseen by U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, lost nearly $2 billion to corruption. In the end, not even the Secretary General nor his family members could escape culpability from the scandal. At the World Bank, somehow $2 billion in cash was misplaced – a computer glitch the Bank alleges. But that is peanuts compared to the $100 billion that Northwestern University Professor Jeffrey Winters’ research shows was squandered by the Bank – directly or indirectly – over time due to corruption. And, according to Professor Winters only about seventy cents of every dollar of loan funds makes its way to the destitute and poor who need the aid the most.

Exorbitant costs, bloated bureaucracies, corruption, secret balloting, and no accountability to a sovereign nation: welcome to globalization. And it isn’t just the bureaucrats with their hands in the till as ambassadors, heads of state, diplomats, and others are deeply enmeshed in supranational negotiations and decision making.

President Trump’s opposition to the funding shenanigans of supranational organizations – Mr. Trump took special aim at the U.N. and NATO – and by extension his animus toward unfair trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Paris Climate Accord, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had globalists in a catatonic state because they feared the loss of the historical obsequiousness of the world’s leading provider. When Joe Biden became President these organizations all breathed a sigh of relief.

GLOBALIZATION AT WORK: THE GREEK EXPERIENCE

The EU represents the most aggressive attempt to integrate sovereign states into a supranational body. The original visionaries of the European Union, World War II German militarists, academics, and industrialists, were determined to prolong the Reich albeit in an economic incarnation. In this, they were supremely successful as they found a way to win the peace albeit having lost the war. New wealth and markets were indeed found for German products but at the expense of the livelihoods of millions of European citizens in less developed areas of the continent.

Greece stands out as a tragic example of a nation that has gotten sideways with the totalitarian practices of the European Union. As a member state of the Eurozone – one of nineteen European countries trading in the Euro currency – Greece has been humiliated for running afoul of the European Union’s dictates. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008 non-market solutions were brought to bear to deal with the crisis. The Troika of supranational organizations – the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the World Bank – forced severe, if not punitive, structural reforms on Greece which have proved counterproductive and which almost guarantee that the nation will never be able to repay its debt of approximately $400 billion. In ironic contrast, as I point out in a separate essay, Germany Has Welched on its Moral Obligations Before, the Greek Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Dimitris Mardas, has calculated that Greece is owed about $305 billion in World War II reparations by the Germans.

The Troika’s measures have clearly compromised the nation’s sovereignty. What is worse, the Troika’s restrictive measures have straight-jacketed the nation’s ability to grow its GDP making it forevermore subservient to the whims of bureaucrats of the European Union. The Troika compelled Greece to implement suffocating capital controls which hampered local investment; adopt austerity programs that have hit every pensioner and worker; and institute budget cutbacks in infrastructure, technology, education, and job training. Austerity has hit higher education and healthcare especially hard. Greece’s university system – free to all who qualify – is severely underfunded and understaffed forcing many departments to close. Healthcare spending has been cut by one-third since the onset of the financial meltdown with millions of citizens devoid of healthcare benefits. As a protest placard brandished before the ministry of health by hospital technicians in Athens poignantly stated “the ministry has moved to Brussels.”

I have witnessed the upshot of many of these “reforms.” Many citizens now eat only sparingly and survive the winter months without heat. Others live with extended families under one roof as a way to share the financial burden. Hospital patients are oftentimes forced to sleep in hallways, many times in beds that have not been disinfected, and to rely on friends and family to supply clean linen and blankets – some hospital rooms can go weeks without hospital staff changing a patient’s bed linen. Hospital rooms have no bedside telephones – never mind television monitors to deliver to patients a source of diversion and entertainment – and no air conditioning. Windows left open to provide a modicum of ventilation let in swarms of insects instead. Of course, families able to afford the expense still rely on the Greek tradition of fakelaki – the little envelope stuffed with bribe money meant to expedite proper care for their loved ones. But money cannot help the infirm and injured be succored as oftentimes ambulances are not available or they arrive too late.

It is no surprise that the population of Greece has declined by close to 5% since the onset of the financial meltdown and will continue to shrink in size. Most worrisome, is that the bulk of those who have chosen to emigrate are young professionals leaving the nation devoid of brainpower. Many who do remain do so because they are trapped by family or other circumstance: a civil engineering graduate who tends bar, a teacher who waits tables, an archaeologist who works at a bakery, among many, many others. In the end, Greece is likely to become not much more than a nation of pensioners and tourists.

SOVEREIGN NATIONS IN THE HANDS OF GLOBALISTS

The Greek experience transpired, in large measure, against the backdrop of a succession of socialist government regimes which lived beyond their means by, among other things, making pension and benefits promises to its citizens which were financially unsustainable if ballot box proof. It’s instructive to remember that Prime Minister of Greece, George Papandreou, a third generation Papandreou who became Prime Minister, like his father and grandfather before him, asserted not many years ago that “…we are observing the birth of global governance, and that …”we must be committed to carrying this out.”

Papandreou’s socialist conceit was further underscored after Marxist-Socialist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras came to power. The self-avowed globalist who got elected on an anti-austerity platform, soon thereafter submitted before the Troika’s confiscatory demands and subsequently became a paragon for austerity that choked the nation.

If the Eurozone has been an unmitigated disaster for a poor nation like Greece how has the most muscular economy in Europe fared? It seems, not as advertised. The German economy has grown at an anemic average of .8% for the last decade. And, when looked at from the point of view of GDP growth per capita of working age, the non-Eurozone countries of Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Norway have outperformed their Eurozone counterparts by a factor of close to seven times. Still, Germany, for all practical purposes, is the European Union. And, the European Union is, practically speaking, a Fourth German Reich.

This state of affairs was presaged by the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, in her 1992 speech at The Hague, the Netherlands, when she said that “Germany’s preponderance within the [European] Community is such that no major decision can really be taken against German wishes. In these circumstances, the Community augments German power rather than containing it.” All you have to do is ask Poland, Germany’s neighbor to the east. Germany virtually controls all media expressions in Poland including Internet portals, radio, television, newspapers, and magazines. Now comes the EU’s meddling and disenfranchising threat if Poland follows through on the sovereign nation’s judicial reform. If that weren’t enough Martin Schulz, the leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), has called for a “constitutional” convention to draft plans for a “United States of Europe” by the year 2025. Countries that fail to ratify the agreement, Mr. Schulz avers, would be forced to leave the Union.

GLOBALIZATION’S END GAME

In 1995, the Commission on Global Governance penned a lengthy report entitled Our Global Neighborhood. The work had the full support of the aforementioned Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali and was financed in part by groups such as the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Read the full Commission report to gain an appreciation for the disdain these globalists have for the sovereign nation-state. But to whet the appetite of the present reader the report calls for, among other things, a global tax system, a standing U.N. Army, an Economic Security Council, and an expanded role for the Secretary General. Now comes the latest assault on the sovereignty of nations by an IMF proposal to create a slush-fund of $650 billion denominated by a super-currency dubbed Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s) to be spent by global technocrats on pet projects as they see fit. It remains to be seen what the effect on the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency will be but the threat is clear.

Commission member and former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, Maurice Strong, made clear his stance on globalism when he stated that “It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states…” This is the same Mr. Strong that left his U.N. post after investigators found he had received a near one-million-dollar check from a South Korean business man who was convicted in a U.S. Federal court for conspiring to bribe U.N. officials in the Oil-for-Food Program.

As the world moves through ever-quickening stages of globalization, with potentially conflicting value systems among individuals and nations, the stage is set for more and more complex dilemmas to emerge. The indigenization being experienced across cultures around the world, especially in Muslim countries, is a clear retort to the unwelcome entreaties of a more interconnected and globalized world. As Professor Samuel P. Huntington states in his provocative book, The Clash of Civilizations, “Little or no evidence exists to support the assumption that the emergence of pervasive global communications is producing a convergence in attitudes and beliefs.” The opposite might be closer to the truth: a more globalized world might become a more conflicted world.

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