This is a wide-lensed and well-documented analysis of ‘globalization’ that lives up to its title. The years since its first publication in 2001 have confirmed and strengthened the original rich evidence of a totalizing depredation of the lives of the majority of the world’s people and their life-support systems.
What readers find in this fully updated mini-classic is a rich spectrum of documented facts showing trends of degeneration of societies and life conditions that media and states fail to recognize and respond to. While their stories and policies remain as systemically disconnected from collective human needs as 15 years ago, this work provides a valuable record of the life-blind system’s march through the world.
Beginning with Cristóbal Colón’s search for new riches turning to genocides, through the US-dominated Bretton Woods and IMF financial framework to the borderless corporate takeover of the world economy as a global casino, and beyond that to the life-and-death issues of poverty and the environment that the ruling economic paradigm blinkers out, the basic facts are held intact through the pressures of an era without a collective memory of its past. The last 35 years of the great depredation of human and natural life systems on Earth have brought no significant policies to prevent the runaway transnational money machine driving the devastation. Even the overdue adaptations recommended in the final chapter remain closed out of international policy discussion.
An accessibly impartial study like this is essential for a minimally informed understanding of these degenerate trends. We cannot sustain humanity or life on Earth by a ceaseless repetition of slogans of ‘growth’, ‘market reforms’, and ‘we must compete harder’ as solutions to collapsing lives and life conditions of the rising majority of the world. The equivalent of a price of a cup coffee in increase of per-capita income is not being ‘lifted out of poverty’. The master ideal of a ‘self-regulating global free market’ is absurd when tens of thousands of new corporate trade rules backed by financial embargo and armed force covertly institute the private demands of global money monoliths – with elected legislatures made subordinate.
Governments now compete to enact the prescribed agenda, or they disappear. Deregulated global capital floods elsewhere in nanoseconds. Dissenting politicians, parties and policies are ignored or pilloried in the press. This second-order reality of ‘buying and selling the world’ remains unspeakable to name, but this book reports basic life consequences tracked over a generation which are generally the opposite of ‘a rising tide lifting all boats’ and ‘new freedom and prosperity for people across the world’.
Paradigm shift can only be achieved by re-grounding in the collective life capital of societies and ecosystems. Yet both continue to be stripped and despoiled by a runaway, private, money-sequence system multiplying itself as the final goal of humanity and the Earth. This system now spans all borders. Globalization: Buying and Selling the World tracks how the most powerful empire in history yields ever more riches to the richest – while hollowing out human and natural life systems.
John McMurtry FRSC,
Professor Emeritus
University of Guelph,
Ontario, Canada.