01-28-2007, 10:51 AM
GLOBALIZATION IS THE NEW IMPERIALISM-
DON'T TRY TO "IMPROVE" IT, BURY IT!
RESTORE NATIONAL-INTEREST POLICIES
Hearing on Trade and Globalization by the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives
Jan 30 2007
Dear Chairman Charles B. Rangel, and other Honorable
Members of the Committee:
We fully support your opening of the work of the 110th Congress, by holding a series of hearings on the economic conditions of the United States; and in that spirit, we respond bluntly to your questions for this third hearing--on how to identify the "successes" of globalization and improve its "benefits"--by stressing this one central point: Globalization has been a raving success for those financial interests who imposed it over the past 40 years; and a disaster--as they intended--for the nations and peoples that are being looted. Therefore, it should be stopped--NOT improved or adjusted to. So-called free (rigged) trade must be stopped, and a set of monetary, foreign policy and economic measures initiated for the mutual benefit of building up nations again.
"Too late? Can't be done?" Not at all. The popular groundswell for "fair" trade, not free trade, and for curbing the "excesses" of globalization, is evident across the United States. Just look at the many articles and books by your fellow Congressmen on the topic. The Nov. 7 election results are a mandate to end the globalization disasters of the last three decades of GATT/NAFTA/WTO/"free trade democracy," and all the other variants. Internationally, a rush of support is awaiting any Congressional initiative in this direction, even for the most preliminary measures. It would signify that the United States is returning to sanity and its founding principles.
Secondly, we have no choice but to confront the real nature of the menace involved in globalization. We are at a blow-out stage of the world monetary and financial system. The unprecedented volumes of speculative activity--mostly denominated in U.S. dollars--are at the point of chain-reactions of non-payment. Look at the bursting of the home mortgage bubble, the commodities prices volatility, the frenzied hedge fund takeovers of economic activity, the privatization-grab for government infrastructure assets, not to mention gambling, otherwise known as derivatives.
"Globalization, The New Imperialism"
"Globalization, The New Imperialism," was the title of a policy document by Lyndon LaRouche in October 2005, which was a forewarning, to provide policymakers the means to understand what we're up against. (See www.larouchepac.com, "A Strategic View of European History Today; Globalization, The New Imperialism.") The United States and other republics would not exist today, if in the 1700s, the leaders of the American colonies, and their European allies, decided to lobby to merely "improve" the conduct of the British and Dutch East India Companies, rather than to break from their imperial control. (In historical fact, the British East India Co. itself backed fake "popular movements" to plead with the Company to not overcharge for goods, to go easy on slaves, and to provide chaplains on commercial missions, etc.).
Unfortunately, these networks were not trounced in the American Revolution, and have attempted to re-gain dominance at many times since. Today, the particulars may be different from the 18th century, but there is a continuity of both the nature of imperial control, and even of the pedigree of major financial interests involved, whose practices are called by economic historians, "Anglo-Dutch liberalism." LaRouche warned in 2005,
"The long-ranging drive of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-oligarchical establishment, over the post-Franklin Roosevelt period of world history, has been to destroy the institution of the sovereign nation-state republic throughout the planet, an intention which has been turned loose, full force, with the collapse of the Soviet system. The name given to this global destruction of sovereignty of nations, including that of the U.S.A. itself, is 'globalization.'
"The systemic characteristic of this transformation, most clearly since the middle to late 1960s, has been the destruction of the so-called ``protectionist model'' of the U.S. economy. The intent has been, including from the government of the U.S.A. itself, to destroy the role of the U.S.A. as a sovereign nation-state, by destroying the so-called 'protectionist' system on which the superiority of the U.S. economy to that of other parts of the world had depended, prior to the 1971-1982 transformation of the U.S. into the presently bankrupt 'service economy' rubbish-bin it has become. The intent of globalization is to make the poverty of the so-called 'developing sector' permanent, by degrading the physical economies of the Americas and Europe to the notoriety of 'Third World' conditions, and by making 'Third World' conditions the standard for economy world-wide."
From this vantage point, we here provide summary documentation and references to back Congressional action to end the globalization era, under three main points:
* history of the imposition of globalization
* review of the damage from globalization
* emergency measures called for.
Globalization Was Imposed, Not "Evolved"
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which set up the post-WW II financial system, a proposal to establish an ITO--International Trade Organization--was voted down. This reflected the prevailing principled view that trade between nations was a prerogative of sovereign governments to determine what was in their mutual best economic interest, and not that of either supra-national agencies, nor private multi-national financial interests. Over the subsequent 15-20 years, this principle continued, despite exceptions and assaults, as post-war reconstruction took place, new nations gained independence, and the prospects for a vast advance in economic conditions globally were indicated in the "Atoms for Peace" program, to harness nuclear power.
The original goal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for a post-war "International New Deal" for deliberate multi-nation collaboration on infrastructure and rapid economic development was thwarted, because of direct opposition through the Truman Administration. But there was still a vector of development underway until the mid-1960s.
However, by the 1970s, this dynamic had been seriously undermined by the opponents of national sovereignty and development. In brief: In 1971, the dollar was "floated," which ushered in the era of increasing uncertainty from fluctuating currency exchange rates, and speculative activity amounting to a World Casino. The graph here shows that over two decades, the volume of currency exchange associated with trade in goods collapsed, in contrast to exchange associated with speculation.
In the United States, deregulation was launched in all manner of vital functions--trucking and rail, health care (1973 was the first HMO act), and energy, culminating in Enronomics. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's Britain became the world model for radical privatization and deregulation. In 1986, with the "Uruguay Round" of the U.N. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade," a Thatcher-type campaign was launched to "reform' the entire world farm and food systems by taking away "trade-distorting" practices such as tariffs and national food reserves.
The sophistry of the GATT globalist movement was shown in its slogan, "One World, One Market' to argue that citizens of every nation had the "right" to access their food and all other needs directly from world sources, not from the "confines" of their own nations. "Borderless" free trade was the goal across the board for banking, labor, industrial and agricultural goods and services, and especially access to minerals and natural resources.
In January 1988, the Canada-United States Free Trade Act was signed. In 1992, NAFTA was concluded. In 1995 the World Trade Organization was established. During this process, when Germany was re-unified in 1990, the "free trade" movement was imposed on it, including on Russia, and other parts of the former Soviet bloc.
In the course of all this, a "blob" of cartels and multi-national financial networks positioned themselves for near-total control and killer-profiteering. In 1968, this was described explicitly as a "world company" project, by George Ball, a former Undersecretary of State, and Chairman of Lehman Brothers, in a speech to a conference of the Bilderberg Society, on whose steering committee he then served. Ball gave an outline of how the archaic nation-state system should be replaced by globalized corporate cartels.
The "names" associated with this process indicate the networks involved. Lehman Brothers itself, along with Lazard, are foremost entities, and have been in the forefront of the sell-off of the U.S. auto/machine tool capacity and other industrial assets, as well as infrastructure rip-offs through what's now politely termed, "Public Private Partnerships." The poster boy for this process is Felix Rohatyn, long at Lazard, and now a top consultant for Lehman. Also in the line-up is George Shultz, direct collaborator of Rohatyn et al. One view of how the networks operate, is provided by John Perkins' book, "Economic Hit Man."
This gang is now under scrutiny for their global equity fund and hedge fund frenzy of LBO grabs of companies, whose operations are then indebted, downsized and ruined.
Below Economic Breakeven
The net effect on the physical economy, of the years of out-sourcing industry, "global-sourcing" food supply and all related hallmark practices of globalization, has been a net reduction of productive capacity and living conditions overall, so that the world economy as a whole is way below even a breakeven threshold of required activity. Specifically: shutting down manufacturing and farming in the United States, and relocating it abroad to cheap labor and low infrastructure sites, causes harm and a net reduction in productivity in all nations involved. Look at some of the features of this, sector by sector.
Industry. There has been an absolute loss of 5.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since 1979--including elimination of nearly half the employment in the aerospace and auto industries, the two major machine-tool reserves of the economy. The re-employment of contingents of these former manufacturing workers at less-skilled, lower-wage jobs has lowered the productivity of the American workforce. U.S. consumption of machine tools is now only 60% of the 1980 level, and 60-70% of that consumption is imported machine tools.
What remains of global industrial capacity is now being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, for example, the Mittal Steel empire, part of the Anglo-Dutch imperium. Steel and heavy industrial goods--measured on a per capita basis of consumption, are declining.
Agriculture. The United States is now food import dependent for 30 to 80 percent of various consumption items, from fruits and vegetables to seafood, even while its former farm counties are experiencing drastic population reductions. On the continent of Africa, food availability per capita is declining. Expected life span itself is dropping in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very few agro-cartels now exert vast control of global food supply lines, including such names as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, as well as Smithfield, Suiza and others. International retail food sales are now dominated by Wal-Mart, Carrefour and a few others.
Population Millions of people are being dislocated by the takedown of national economies. In the United States, there are 12 million Mexicans who would otherwise be in their homeland, but for the free-trade breakdown process. The nation of the Philippines is dependent on remittances from its citizens who are forced to seek work abroad. This is true for all of Central America. In Africa, the refugee population is in the millions. The population of Russia is declining in absolute numbers.
Biological Breakdown With the decline in infrastructure over the past years--water, power, transportation, health care--the rise of new and resurgent diseases now poses the threat of biological holocaust. This is typified, but not confined to avian flu, or to the new strain of "super"-tuberculosis, now spreading in southern Africa.
Food shocks are also in store, because of the absence of food reserves, and contingencies for botanical pests. A new wheat rust is making its way from eastern Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula, eastward toward the Indian sub-continent, on a spread-path potentially involving 25% of global wheat output. The reason for the danger is that in recent decades, resources were not put into having stand-by resistant wheat varieties, but instead, private agro-companies came to dominate seed development--including gaining sweeping patent rights--for their own purposes of control and furthering monoculture.
Emergency Measures/The FDR Paradigm
These then, are just a few elements of the "Big Picture" of how far gone we are under globalization. No fix-ups will work, of labor standards or environmental codes, or the like. Emergency action is required. In brief, there are two main areas for legislative initiative. First, to stabilize currency exchange, and put in place measures to prevent insolvencies causing out-of-control shutdown of vital goods and services activities. In particular, the Federal Reserve banking system--with trillions in unpayable claims of derivatives and other "assets"--is bankupt; and government action is required to place the Federal Reserve under bankruptcy protection and re-organization, in order that required levels of banking function are maintained and obligations honored, but claims equivalent to gambling are frozen at lowest priority.
Going along with this, is the need to initiate nation-to-nation agreements for mutually beneficial fair trade, and to call a halt to the harmful "free trade" commitments and flows. Roll-back the free trade agreements completely.
Secondly, for both domestic and state-to-state economic activity, initiatives are needed to further large-scale shifts away from the so-called "services economy" model, and shift into a capital-intensive production model, for all national economies. For the U.S. economy, draft legislation has been provided to your Committee, in testimony for your Jan. 23, 2007 hearing, called the "The Economic Recovery Act of 2006."
What is involved most simply, is to take a "capital budget approach," in which the Federal government initiates low-interest credit for priority national infrastructure projects, to be carried out by private contractors. The precedents are clear from the FDR period. And today, the range of infrastructure required is also crystal clear--as described, for example, by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dams, bridges, new health facilities, ports, water treatment and conveyance, and as the centerpiece: high-tech railroads and advanced nuclear power.
Gearing up to fulfill these infrastructure projects generates the need for millions of new skilled jobs, and for re-tooling, restoring, and expanding the U.S. machine tool/manufacturing capacity.
A detailed policy document on this process is available: "What Congress Needs to Learn: The Lost Art of the Capital Budget," Dec. 22, 2006, by Lyndon LaRouche. (Available in EIR, Vol. 34, No. 2, Jan. 12, 2007, on www.larouchepub.com).
Science Driver
In summary, the program that is now required to bury globalization can be accomplished by a "return to the kind of thinking associated with a 'fair trade,' rather than 'free trade' economy." LaRouche describes this as, "thinking about physical and financial capital as we did under Franklin Roosevelt.
"The principle on which the success of such a program depends, is the principle of fostering the increase of physical productivity, per capita and per square kilometer, through science-driven technological progress in the improvement of the productive powers of labor. This means technological progress as expressed by emphasis on a science-driver economy of the type which brought the U.S. and its allies to victory over Hitler et al. in the preparation for, and conduct of World War II.
"Against the customary carping critics of such measures, consider the following.
"Had Franklin Roosevelt lived, the freeing of the world from the imperial legacy of colonialism and the like, would have created a vast capital market for the products of a converted U.S. war production buildup, the reinvestment of the war debt margins in new capital formation, here and abroad, although it would have been associated with the combination of a temporary austerity, but a healthy accumulation of real capital..."
Now, over 50 years later, we face the severe depletion of our capital stock after three decades of globalization. But the principles of "FDR thinking" still apply. If we take the right emergency measures during the transition, we can drive the economy ahead through resuming the science associated with nuclear power--the "fourth generation" (high temperature) reactors, the R&D to harness fusion power, and the entry into an "isotope economy" of man-made "natural" elements to overcome exhausted resources. There can be life after globalization, better than ever.
Hearing on Trade and Globalization by the Ways and Means Committee
of the House of Representatives
Jan. 30, 2007
GLOBALIZATION, THE NEW IMPERIALISM
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
October 9, 2005
http://larouchepac.com/pages/writings_fi...istory.htm
By traditional standards, the accelerating degeneration of the U.S. military-political occupation of Iraq, has already entered the terminal phase of the currently failed war policies of the U.S. George W. Bush, Jr. Administration.The global strategic situation of the moment can be brought into focus by saying simply that the presently advanced state of degeneration of the U.S. military operations in both Iraq itself and the adjoining region, interacts with a threatened early disintegration of the world's present IMF monetary-financial system.
We have entered a time during which only the combined dumping of the policies of the current Bush Administration, and the launching of first steps toward a new world monetary-financial system akin to that of the original Bretton Woods system, could prevent the otherwise inevitable early plunge of the planet as a whole into a new dark age.
We have entered a time in world history, when any different remedy than that which I have just recommended, were the wishful dream of self-damned fools.
To rational elements among the more well-informed circles of the planet, as one month follows another, the evidence to that effect is now more and more painfully clear. Were the present majority among the leading management cadres of today's world fully rational, the wild-eyed monetarist experiment launched under the U.S. current Bush Administration would be declared a bad job, and a return to the relatively successful economic and related policies of the immediate two post-war decades, would be rapidly resumed.
For example: In the case of the U.S.A. itself, although I warned, repeatedly, during the Spring and early Summer of this year, that we must prepare for the chain-reaction-like effects of an early "crash" in the automotive sector, no significant action was taken, either in the Executive or Congress, on that specific account.
The most notable point to be made on this present occasion is, that the argument for avoiding the urgently needed precautionary measures, was that relevant circles were advised that I had been mistaken respecting the factors of timing and more deep-going issues of policy in this matter. It is typical of the conditioned state of mind among our nation's and Europe's makers and shakers, that we are met, in each recent stage of a growing national and global economic crisis, by the potentially fatal effects of a reluctance of the presently reigning political generation to "put the toothpaste back into the tube," a reluctance to tamper with those habituated, recent decades' changes in policy which have now led us to the brink of the greatest global financial-monetary and economic collapse in modern history.
Now, the consequences of that Hamlet-like kind of inaction, motivated in that Hamlet-like fashion, have brought our republic, and much of the world besides, into a situation far more deadly than existed those few months ago, when precautionary action against the principal, presently looming effects of the General Motors crisis might have been set into motion.
What Must Now Be Done
The problem which needs urgently to be corrected, is not only that the currently ruling, powerful combination of international monetary-financial interests has been ignorant and increasingly irrational. The problem is the conditioned fear of the power of the financier class, which has been spread among the political and other leading currents of our society, both in the Americas and Europe. It is the policies of those financier circles which have intentionally ruined what had been once the flourishing economies of the U.S.A. and western Europe of the period prior to the great Anglo-American financial paradigm-shift of the 1964-1972 interval.
Today, the policies of those financier interests have ruined the Americas and Europe almost irreparably, especially during the nearly sixteen years since the close of 1989, when the Soviet challenge no longer existed to prompt our maintaining our economies. Today, those financier interests which triumph over the ruin they have wreaked upon us, insist that they will never permit national economies, ever again, to reach for supremacy of the sovereign nation over the predatory lurchings of that global slime-mold-like financier oligarchy, which has looted nations down to levels of productive output which are currently actually below breakeven for the national economies of Europe and the Americas as a whole.
The generally expressed intent of practice among those financier circles, whose current majority, whatever their level of intellectual development, is typified by its mad obsession, its intent to bring about a modern caricature of the old medieval, ultramontane system in which Europe was under the tyranny of an anti-nation-state alliance of Venice's predatory financier oligarchy, with that self-styled holy league of butchers known as the Norman chivalry. Today, the mad dash for such an ultramontane form of global imperialism is called by such names as "globalization."
This intent by such financier "slime-molds," has been the underlying issue of two so-called "world wars" and the great thermonuclear conflict of the century just concluded. This intent is the key for understanding the military and related policies of the Vice President Cheney-directed U.S. Bush Administration today.
Said otherwise, the presently avowed goal of these slime-mold-like aggregations of private financier interest, is to establish a world system in which either nation-states cease to exist, or they are degraded to lackeys, begging at the footstools of financier-oligarchical power. It is that kind of a system which these oligarchical circles demand now; it is a system known popularly today as "globalization."
In effect, it could be said of some very influential circles, that the financier slime-mold of the same Synarchist International which created the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, wishes presently to have something like a nuclear "Battle of Armageddon," and to win it, soon. The purpose of launching such a horror is to clear away the residues of former nation-state institutions, including those of our Federal Constitution. Although these forces could never succeed in their attempt to establish a permanent new world empire, the intended results imply that the power they serve is perhaps the true whore of the earlier Babylons, imperial Rome and medieval Venice.
Once any intelligent person understood the present resurgence of the same policies which motivated England's Edward VII to organize what became known as "World War I," what I have just stated should also be readily and correctly understood. The financier attempt would fail, catastrophically, for both assailant and victims, alike, but the evidence of such a looming reality never convinced the victim of a true obsession.
In the meantime, the present situation is as follows.
There is the growing popular sense of things, among those of us who represent the relatively economics-literate circles of Europe and the Americas, that the strategic and economic situations of these regions of the world are now verging upon a highly explosive state of over-ripeness for a general collapse. The most menacing feature of this present crisis, is the widespread lack of competent strategic insight, even among most relevant specialists and political authorities, alike, into the causes and underlying character of the complex, general global situation which the immediately recognized crisis-developments only reflect. The true, deeper origins, causes, and probable historical outcomes of these looming catastrophes, are not yet generally understood, even among the relatively best-informed leading circles of governments in North America and Europe.
The worst aspect of this, is not that leading political and related authorities do not recognize the nature and causes of this onrushing crisis. The worst aspect is that most among them, so far, now, as on the eve of crises such as that of 1929, have not wished to know, even to hear the truth about this onrushing situation.
This is, in itself, a correct view of the immediate expression of the danger, but it, too, fails to look deep enough.
It must be fairly said, that, while more and more leading U.S. circles are reacting to the perceived reality of the symptoms this situation presents, they have yet to find in themselves the willingness to accept the more essential fact of the matter. Until this point, they have remained blinded to the existence of the actual, underlying disease which these symptoms reflect. A growing minority of the leading relevant circles in North America and Europe recognize many of the symptoms; but even all of them, so far, refuse to accept the fact of the disease itself.
It is my intention, in this present report, to correct the widespread ignorance of the deeper causes for today's actual, currently rapidly worsening world situation.
To restate the case: As a result of that discrepancy in general understanding of the problem, even among leading circles, current directions in policy thinking are fairly characterized as growing zeal for ameliorating the most obvious and immediate symptoms, without willingness to challenge the long-ranging, globally disastrous threats posed by the relevant, potentially fatal disease. They overlook the deeper, real causes of our growing tribulations, in their zeal to blind themselves to the deeper causes for the mere symptoms. The manifest intent of their practice is to reform the enemy without actually annoying him.
In the closing portion of this present report, I shall touch the core of this problem in mass political behavior; but, to be understood thus, in the end, we must proceed in the fashion of peeling away layers of the proverbial onion, turning first to the matter of recent generations' experience of major wars, and finally reaching the core of the problem, through progress in examining a series of successive, intervening, deeper layers of the problem overall.
On the first of these layers, the outer layer, so to speak, is the root of this failure of leading circles of governments of, most notably, North America and Europe, to recognize and attack the disease of recently experienced recurrence of world war itself, to attack the propensity for misunderstanding war. This is a propensity which can be traced, in its essentials, to the prevailing academic and popularized misconception of the actually primary cause of the principal wars and related crises which have afflicted globally extended European civilization since that famous Paris Treaty of February 1763, which launched the people of English-speaking North America into what became the 1776-1783 war for national liberty.
Therefore, this present report is given as a summary of that specific historic problem which underlies the mounting global, existential complex of crisis of today. I shall now preface that summary at the door of today's White House. In earlier reports, I have addressed some of the crucial, leading facts treated here. The difference is, that, in this report, I focus on the same specific, centuries-old feature of the military strategic situation which modern European governments have stubbornly, repeatedly refused to take efficiently into account, up to the present moment.
Therefore, to complete this preface, I begin now with an introduction to the matter of current threats of warfare, taking as an example, the tragic case of the present U.S. Bush Administration.
At the White House Press Conferences
Like the President George W. Bush, Jr. Administration's stubbornly lying about his seemingly endless war in Iraq, most of what has been taught about the causes of modern warfare, in our history lessons, and by notable political leaders, is conventional fraud, when it is not outright stupidity, like that of President Bush himself.
To be fair to that President, we must concede that he rarely knows the actual meaning of the words coming out of his mouth. It often appears, that he is to be seen on our television screens as gaping in wonder at the spectacle of that flow of words from that orifice. Nonetheless, he lied repeatedly, as a way of getting us into that war. That much conceded, whether he lied in the fashion of Vice-President Cheney's "Mortimer Snerd"-like wooden puppet, or otherwise, it has been just those lying words from his mouth which got us into an Iraq from which, it seems, more and more, that there is neither hope of victory, nor honorable escape, for as long as the "Bergen-Snerd" team of that Vice-President and his President remains in office.
So, it is the case, that impeachments, or a decent sort of timely resignation from office, as was used to settle the breakdown of government threatened by Nixon's continued incumbency, are on the tips of the tongues of more and more sensible political leaders of our nation today.
Under other circumstances, where decency permitted us to be more generous in our description of that poor President, we would then treat him gently, and view him charitably, as a poor fellow who could read neither a page, nor a map, nor, probably, distinguish between the two. He has, like all persons, his rightful place in the enjoyment of life, but the terrible price our nation has already paid for his mistakes in that office, shows all sentient beings that his personal right does not include the U.S. Presidency.
In any case, we must put the blame where it belongs. Those failings of that President are no excuse for the relevant behavior of the U.S.A. itself; the people of the U.S.A. can make no acceptable evasion of the fact of their own guilt, if it were only the great guilt in allowing such a wretched incompetent as poor George W. Bush, Jr., to be seriously considered by them as a contender for election as President. When the people stop blaming Washington as much as they do, and blame their own cowardly political evasion of a citizen's responsibility more, the challenge might be quickly addressed.
The fact remains, that what the U.S. public, up to very high ranks in office, have been swindled into believing about modern warfare in general, is not merely deliberately misleading hokum. What they have been told, is the proverbial big lie. These poor people of ours, in general, soaked in cheap and tawdry forms of entertainment, have recently shown little or no comprehension of the actual nature of the world in which they live. Even notable Presidents of our republic, or heads of government abroad, have often mistaken their privileged familiarity with some among the sensitive predicates of current history for the actual subject of the long-ranging dynamics of history as such.
So, today's political idiot, like a character in a script by the utterly depraved Bertolt Brecht, marks his entry on the stage of current history, by babbling his lunatic sophist's chant, "I don't believe in conspiracy-theories."
DON'T TRY TO "IMPROVE" IT, BURY IT!
RESTORE NATIONAL-INTEREST POLICIES
Hearing on Trade and Globalization by the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives
Jan 30 2007
Dear Chairman Charles B. Rangel, and other Honorable
Members of the Committee:
We fully support your opening of the work of the 110th Congress, by holding a series of hearings on the economic conditions of the United States; and in that spirit, we respond bluntly to your questions for this third hearing--on how to identify the "successes" of globalization and improve its "benefits"--by stressing this one central point: Globalization has been a raving success for those financial interests who imposed it over the past 40 years; and a disaster--as they intended--for the nations and peoples that are being looted. Therefore, it should be stopped--NOT improved or adjusted to. So-called free (rigged) trade must be stopped, and a set of monetary, foreign policy and economic measures initiated for the mutual benefit of building up nations again.
"Too late? Can't be done?" Not at all. The popular groundswell for "fair" trade, not free trade, and for curbing the "excesses" of globalization, is evident across the United States. Just look at the many articles and books by your fellow Congressmen on the topic. The Nov. 7 election results are a mandate to end the globalization disasters of the last three decades of GATT/NAFTA/WTO/"free trade democracy," and all the other variants. Internationally, a rush of support is awaiting any Congressional initiative in this direction, even for the most preliminary measures. It would signify that the United States is returning to sanity and its founding principles.
Secondly, we have no choice but to confront the real nature of the menace involved in globalization. We are at a blow-out stage of the world monetary and financial system. The unprecedented volumes of speculative activity--mostly denominated in U.S. dollars--are at the point of chain-reactions of non-payment. Look at the bursting of the home mortgage bubble, the commodities prices volatility, the frenzied hedge fund takeovers of economic activity, the privatization-grab for government infrastructure assets, not to mention gambling, otherwise known as derivatives.
"Globalization, The New Imperialism"
"Globalization, The New Imperialism," was the title of a policy document by Lyndon LaRouche in October 2005, which was a forewarning, to provide policymakers the means to understand what we're up against. (See www.larouchepac.com, "A Strategic View of European History Today; Globalization, The New Imperialism.") The United States and other republics would not exist today, if in the 1700s, the leaders of the American colonies, and their European allies, decided to lobby to merely "improve" the conduct of the British and Dutch East India Companies, rather than to break from their imperial control. (In historical fact, the British East India Co. itself backed fake "popular movements" to plead with the Company to not overcharge for goods, to go easy on slaves, and to provide chaplains on commercial missions, etc.).
Unfortunately, these networks were not trounced in the American Revolution, and have attempted to re-gain dominance at many times since. Today, the particulars may be different from the 18th century, but there is a continuity of both the nature of imperial control, and even of the pedigree of major financial interests involved, whose practices are called by economic historians, "Anglo-Dutch liberalism." LaRouche warned in 2005,
"The long-ranging drive of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-oligarchical establishment, over the post-Franklin Roosevelt period of world history, has been to destroy the institution of the sovereign nation-state republic throughout the planet, an intention which has been turned loose, full force, with the collapse of the Soviet system. The name given to this global destruction of sovereignty of nations, including that of the U.S.A. itself, is 'globalization.'
"The systemic characteristic of this transformation, most clearly since the middle to late 1960s, has been the destruction of the so-called ``protectionist model'' of the U.S. economy. The intent has been, including from the government of the U.S.A. itself, to destroy the role of the U.S.A. as a sovereign nation-state, by destroying the so-called 'protectionist' system on which the superiority of the U.S. economy to that of other parts of the world had depended, prior to the 1971-1982 transformation of the U.S. into the presently bankrupt 'service economy' rubbish-bin it has become. The intent of globalization is to make the poverty of the so-called 'developing sector' permanent, by degrading the physical economies of the Americas and Europe to the notoriety of 'Third World' conditions, and by making 'Third World' conditions the standard for economy world-wide."
From this vantage point, we here provide summary documentation and references to back Congressional action to end the globalization era, under three main points:
* history of the imposition of globalization
* review of the damage from globalization
* emergency measures called for.
Globalization Was Imposed, Not "Evolved"
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which set up the post-WW II financial system, a proposal to establish an ITO--International Trade Organization--was voted down. This reflected the prevailing principled view that trade between nations was a prerogative of sovereign governments to determine what was in their mutual best economic interest, and not that of either supra-national agencies, nor private multi-national financial interests. Over the subsequent 15-20 years, this principle continued, despite exceptions and assaults, as post-war reconstruction took place, new nations gained independence, and the prospects for a vast advance in economic conditions globally were indicated in the "Atoms for Peace" program, to harness nuclear power.
The original goal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for a post-war "International New Deal" for deliberate multi-nation collaboration on infrastructure and rapid economic development was thwarted, because of direct opposition through the Truman Administration. But there was still a vector of development underway until the mid-1960s.
However, by the 1970s, this dynamic had been seriously undermined by the opponents of national sovereignty and development. In brief: In 1971, the dollar was "floated," which ushered in the era of increasing uncertainty from fluctuating currency exchange rates, and speculative activity amounting to a World Casino. The graph here shows that over two decades, the volume of currency exchange associated with trade in goods collapsed, in contrast to exchange associated with speculation.
In the United States, deregulation was launched in all manner of vital functions--trucking and rail, health care (1973 was the first HMO act), and energy, culminating in Enronomics. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's Britain became the world model for radical privatization and deregulation. In 1986, with the "Uruguay Round" of the U.N. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade," a Thatcher-type campaign was launched to "reform' the entire world farm and food systems by taking away "trade-distorting" practices such as tariffs and national food reserves.
The sophistry of the GATT globalist movement was shown in its slogan, "One World, One Market' to argue that citizens of every nation had the "right" to access their food and all other needs directly from world sources, not from the "confines" of their own nations. "Borderless" free trade was the goal across the board for banking, labor, industrial and agricultural goods and services, and especially access to minerals and natural resources.
In January 1988, the Canada-United States Free Trade Act was signed. In 1992, NAFTA was concluded. In 1995 the World Trade Organization was established. During this process, when Germany was re-unified in 1990, the "free trade" movement was imposed on it, including on Russia, and other parts of the former Soviet bloc.
In the course of all this, a "blob" of cartels and multi-national financial networks positioned themselves for near-total control and killer-profiteering. In 1968, this was described explicitly as a "world company" project, by George Ball, a former Undersecretary of State, and Chairman of Lehman Brothers, in a speech to a conference of the Bilderberg Society, on whose steering committee he then served. Ball gave an outline of how the archaic nation-state system should be replaced by globalized corporate cartels.
The "names" associated with this process indicate the networks involved. Lehman Brothers itself, along with Lazard, are foremost entities, and have been in the forefront of the sell-off of the U.S. auto/machine tool capacity and other industrial assets, as well as infrastructure rip-offs through what's now politely termed, "Public Private Partnerships." The poster boy for this process is Felix Rohatyn, long at Lazard, and now a top consultant for Lehman. Also in the line-up is George Shultz, direct collaborator of Rohatyn et al. One view of how the networks operate, is provided by John Perkins' book, "Economic Hit Man."
This gang is now under scrutiny for their global equity fund and hedge fund frenzy of LBO grabs of companies, whose operations are then indebted, downsized and ruined.
Below Economic Breakeven
The net effect on the physical economy, of the years of out-sourcing industry, "global-sourcing" food supply and all related hallmark practices of globalization, has been a net reduction of productive capacity and living conditions overall, so that the world economy as a whole is way below even a breakeven threshold of required activity. Specifically: shutting down manufacturing and farming in the United States, and relocating it abroad to cheap labor and low infrastructure sites, causes harm and a net reduction in productivity in all nations involved. Look at some of the features of this, sector by sector.
Industry. There has been an absolute loss of 5.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since 1979--including elimination of nearly half the employment in the aerospace and auto industries, the two major machine-tool reserves of the economy. The re-employment of contingents of these former manufacturing workers at less-skilled, lower-wage jobs has lowered the productivity of the American workforce. U.S. consumption of machine tools is now only 60% of the 1980 level, and 60-70% of that consumption is imported machine tools.
What remains of global industrial capacity is now being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, for example, the Mittal Steel empire, part of the Anglo-Dutch imperium. Steel and heavy industrial goods--measured on a per capita basis of consumption, are declining.
Agriculture. The United States is now food import dependent for 30 to 80 percent of various consumption items, from fruits and vegetables to seafood, even while its former farm counties are experiencing drastic population reductions. On the continent of Africa, food availability per capita is declining. Expected life span itself is dropping in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very few agro-cartels now exert vast control of global food supply lines, including such names as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, as well as Smithfield, Suiza and others. International retail food sales are now dominated by Wal-Mart, Carrefour and a few others.
Population Millions of people are being dislocated by the takedown of national economies. In the United States, there are 12 million Mexicans who would otherwise be in their homeland, but for the free-trade breakdown process. The nation of the Philippines is dependent on remittances from its citizens who are forced to seek work abroad. This is true for all of Central America. In Africa, the refugee population is in the millions. The population of Russia is declining in absolute numbers.
Biological Breakdown With the decline in infrastructure over the past years--water, power, transportation, health care--the rise of new and resurgent diseases now poses the threat of biological holocaust. This is typified, but not confined to avian flu, or to the new strain of "super"-tuberculosis, now spreading in southern Africa.
Food shocks are also in store, because of the absence of food reserves, and contingencies for botanical pests. A new wheat rust is making its way from eastern Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula, eastward toward the Indian sub-continent, on a spread-path potentially involving 25% of global wheat output. The reason for the danger is that in recent decades, resources were not put into having stand-by resistant wheat varieties, but instead, private agro-companies came to dominate seed development--including gaining sweeping patent rights--for their own purposes of control and furthering monoculture.
Emergency Measures/The FDR Paradigm
These then, are just a few elements of the "Big Picture" of how far gone we are under globalization. No fix-ups will work, of labor standards or environmental codes, or the like. Emergency action is required. In brief, there are two main areas for legislative initiative. First, to stabilize currency exchange, and put in place measures to prevent insolvencies causing out-of-control shutdown of vital goods and services activities. In particular, the Federal Reserve banking system--with trillions in unpayable claims of derivatives and other "assets"--is bankupt; and government action is required to place the Federal Reserve under bankruptcy protection and re-organization, in order that required levels of banking function are maintained and obligations honored, but claims equivalent to gambling are frozen at lowest priority.
Going along with this, is the need to initiate nation-to-nation agreements for mutually beneficial fair trade, and to call a halt to the harmful "free trade" commitments and flows. Roll-back the free trade agreements completely.
Secondly, for both domestic and state-to-state economic activity, initiatives are needed to further large-scale shifts away from the so-called "services economy" model, and shift into a capital-intensive production model, for all national economies. For the U.S. economy, draft legislation has been provided to your Committee, in testimony for your Jan. 23, 2007 hearing, called the "The Economic Recovery Act of 2006."
What is involved most simply, is to take a "capital budget approach," in which the Federal government initiates low-interest credit for priority national infrastructure projects, to be carried out by private contractors. The precedents are clear from the FDR period. And today, the range of infrastructure required is also crystal clear--as described, for example, by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dams, bridges, new health facilities, ports, water treatment and conveyance, and as the centerpiece: high-tech railroads and advanced nuclear power.
Gearing up to fulfill these infrastructure projects generates the need for millions of new skilled jobs, and for re-tooling, restoring, and expanding the U.S. machine tool/manufacturing capacity.
A detailed policy document on this process is available: "What Congress Needs to Learn: The Lost Art of the Capital Budget," Dec. 22, 2006, by Lyndon LaRouche. (Available in EIR, Vol. 34, No. 2, Jan. 12, 2007, on www.larouchepub.com).
Science Driver
In summary, the program that is now required to bury globalization can be accomplished by a "return to the kind of thinking associated with a 'fair trade,' rather than 'free trade' economy." LaRouche describes this as, "thinking about physical and financial capital as we did under Franklin Roosevelt.
"The principle on which the success of such a program depends, is the principle of fostering the increase of physical productivity, per capita and per square kilometer, through science-driven technological progress in the improvement of the productive powers of labor. This means technological progress as expressed by emphasis on a science-driver economy of the type which brought the U.S. and its allies to victory over Hitler et al. in the preparation for, and conduct of World War II.
"Against the customary carping critics of such measures, consider the following.
"Had Franklin Roosevelt lived, the freeing of the world from the imperial legacy of colonialism and the like, would have created a vast capital market for the products of a converted U.S. war production buildup, the reinvestment of the war debt margins in new capital formation, here and abroad, although it would have been associated with the combination of a temporary austerity, but a healthy accumulation of real capital..."
Now, over 50 years later, we face the severe depletion of our capital stock after three decades of globalization. But the principles of "FDR thinking" still apply. If we take the right emergency measures during the transition, we can drive the economy ahead through resuming the science associated with nuclear power--the "fourth generation" (high temperature) reactors, the R&D to harness fusion power, and the entry into an "isotope economy" of man-made "natural" elements to overcome exhausted resources. There can be life after globalization, better than ever.
Hearing on Trade and Globalization by the Ways and Means Committee
of the House of Representatives
Jan. 30, 2007
GLOBALIZATION, THE NEW IMPERIALISM
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
October 9, 2005
http://larouchepac.com/pages/writings_fi...istory.htm
By traditional standards, the accelerating degeneration of the U.S. military-political occupation of Iraq, has already entered the terminal phase of the currently failed war policies of the U.S. George W. Bush, Jr. Administration.The global strategic situation of the moment can be brought into focus by saying simply that the presently advanced state of degeneration of the U.S. military operations in both Iraq itself and the adjoining region, interacts with a threatened early disintegration of the world's present IMF monetary-financial system.
We have entered a time during which only the combined dumping of the policies of the current Bush Administration, and the launching of first steps toward a new world monetary-financial system akin to that of the original Bretton Woods system, could prevent the otherwise inevitable early plunge of the planet as a whole into a new dark age.
We have entered a time in world history, when any different remedy than that which I have just recommended, were the wishful dream of self-damned fools.
To rational elements among the more well-informed circles of the planet, as one month follows another, the evidence to that effect is now more and more painfully clear. Were the present majority among the leading management cadres of today's world fully rational, the wild-eyed monetarist experiment launched under the U.S. current Bush Administration would be declared a bad job, and a return to the relatively successful economic and related policies of the immediate two post-war decades, would be rapidly resumed.
For example: In the case of the U.S.A. itself, although I warned, repeatedly, during the Spring and early Summer of this year, that we must prepare for the chain-reaction-like effects of an early "crash" in the automotive sector, no significant action was taken, either in the Executive or Congress, on that specific account.
The most notable point to be made on this present occasion is, that the argument for avoiding the urgently needed precautionary measures, was that relevant circles were advised that I had been mistaken respecting the factors of timing and more deep-going issues of policy in this matter. It is typical of the conditioned state of mind among our nation's and Europe's makers and shakers, that we are met, in each recent stage of a growing national and global economic crisis, by the potentially fatal effects of a reluctance of the presently reigning political generation to "put the toothpaste back into the tube," a reluctance to tamper with those habituated, recent decades' changes in policy which have now led us to the brink of the greatest global financial-monetary and economic collapse in modern history.
Now, the consequences of that Hamlet-like kind of inaction, motivated in that Hamlet-like fashion, have brought our republic, and much of the world besides, into a situation far more deadly than existed those few months ago, when precautionary action against the principal, presently looming effects of the General Motors crisis might have been set into motion.
What Must Now Be Done
The problem which needs urgently to be corrected, is not only that the currently ruling, powerful combination of international monetary-financial interests has been ignorant and increasingly irrational. The problem is the conditioned fear of the power of the financier class, which has been spread among the political and other leading currents of our society, both in the Americas and Europe. It is the policies of those financier circles which have intentionally ruined what had been once the flourishing economies of the U.S.A. and western Europe of the period prior to the great Anglo-American financial paradigm-shift of the 1964-1972 interval.
Today, the policies of those financier interests have ruined the Americas and Europe almost irreparably, especially during the nearly sixteen years since the close of 1989, when the Soviet challenge no longer existed to prompt our maintaining our economies. Today, those financier interests which triumph over the ruin they have wreaked upon us, insist that they will never permit national economies, ever again, to reach for supremacy of the sovereign nation over the predatory lurchings of that global slime-mold-like financier oligarchy, which has looted nations down to levels of productive output which are currently actually below breakeven for the national economies of Europe and the Americas as a whole.
The generally expressed intent of practice among those financier circles, whose current majority, whatever their level of intellectual development, is typified by its mad obsession, its intent to bring about a modern caricature of the old medieval, ultramontane system in which Europe was under the tyranny of an anti-nation-state alliance of Venice's predatory financier oligarchy, with that self-styled holy league of butchers known as the Norman chivalry. Today, the mad dash for such an ultramontane form of global imperialism is called by such names as "globalization."
This intent by such financier "slime-molds," has been the underlying issue of two so-called "world wars" and the great thermonuclear conflict of the century just concluded. This intent is the key for understanding the military and related policies of the Vice President Cheney-directed U.S. Bush Administration today.
Said otherwise, the presently avowed goal of these slime-mold-like aggregations of private financier interest, is to establish a world system in which either nation-states cease to exist, or they are degraded to lackeys, begging at the footstools of financier-oligarchical power. It is that kind of a system which these oligarchical circles demand now; it is a system known popularly today as "globalization."
In effect, it could be said of some very influential circles, that the financier slime-mold of the same Synarchist International which created the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, wishes presently to have something like a nuclear "Battle of Armageddon," and to win it, soon. The purpose of launching such a horror is to clear away the residues of former nation-state institutions, including those of our Federal Constitution. Although these forces could never succeed in their attempt to establish a permanent new world empire, the intended results imply that the power they serve is perhaps the true whore of the earlier Babylons, imperial Rome and medieval Venice.
Once any intelligent person understood the present resurgence of the same policies which motivated England's Edward VII to organize what became known as "World War I," what I have just stated should also be readily and correctly understood. The financier attempt would fail, catastrophically, for both assailant and victims, alike, but the evidence of such a looming reality never convinced the victim of a true obsession.
In the meantime, the present situation is as follows.
There is the growing popular sense of things, among those of us who represent the relatively economics-literate circles of Europe and the Americas, that the strategic and economic situations of these regions of the world are now verging upon a highly explosive state of over-ripeness for a general collapse. The most menacing feature of this present crisis, is the widespread lack of competent strategic insight, even among most relevant specialists and political authorities, alike, into the causes and underlying character of the complex, general global situation which the immediately recognized crisis-developments only reflect. The true, deeper origins, causes, and probable historical outcomes of these looming catastrophes, are not yet generally understood, even among the relatively best-informed leading circles of governments in North America and Europe.
The worst aspect of this, is not that leading political and related authorities do not recognize the nature and causes of this onrushing crisis. The worst aspect is that most among them, so far, now, as on the eve of crises such as that of 1929, have not wished to know, even to hear the truth about this onrushing situation.
This is, in itself, a correct view of the immediate expression of the danger, but it, too, fails to look deep enough.
It must be fairly said, that, while more and more leading U.S. circles are reacting to the perceived reality of the symptoms this situation presents, they have yet to find in themselves the willingness to accept the more essential fact of the matter. Until this point, they have remained blinded to the existence of the actual, underlying disease which these symptoms reflect. A growing minority of the leading relevant circles in North America and Europe recognize many of the symptoms; but even all of them, so far, refuse to accept the fact of the disease itself.
It is my intention, in this present report, to correct the widespread ignorance of the deeper causes for today's actual, currently rapidly worsening world situation.
To restate the case: As a result of that discrepancy in general understanding of the problem, even among leading circles, current directions in policy thinking are fairly characterized as growing zeal for ameliorating the most obvious and immediate symptoms, without willingness to challenge the long-ranging, globally disastrous threats posed by the relevant, potentially fatal disease. They overlook the deeper, real causes of our growing tribulations, in their zeal to blind themselves to the deeper causes for the mere symptoms. The manifest intent of their practice is to reform the enemy without actually annoying him.
In the closing portion of this present report, I shall touch the core of this problem in mass political behavior; but, to be understood thus, in the end, we must proceed in the fashion of peeling away layers of the proverbial onion, turning first to the matter of recent generations' experience of major wars, and finally reaching the core of the problem, through progress in examining a series of successive, intervening, deeper layers of the problem overall.
On the first of these layers, the outer layer, so to speak, is the root of this failure of leading circles of governments of, most notably, North America and Europe, to recognize and attack the disease of recently experienced recurrence of world war itself, to attack the propensity for misunderstanding war. This is a propensity which can be traced, in its essentials, to the prevailing academic and popularized misconception of the actually primary cause of the principal wars and related crises which have afflicted globally extended European civilization since that famous Paris Treaty of February 1763, which launched the people of English-speaking North America into what became the 1776-1783 war for national liberty.
Therefore, this present report is given as a summary of that specific historic problem which underlies the mounting global, existential complex of crisis of today. I shall now preface that summary at the door of today's White House. In earlier reports, I have addressed some of the crucial, leading facts treated here. The difference is, that, in this report, I focus on the same specific, centuries-old feature of the military strategic situation which modern European governments have stubbornly, repeatedly refused to take efficiently into account, up to the present moment.
Therefore, to complete this preface, I begin now with an introduction to the matter of current threats of warfare, taking as an example, the tragic case of the present U.S. Bush Administration.
At the White House Press Conferences
Like the President George W. Bush, Jr. Administration's stubbornly lying about his seemingly endless war in Iraq, most of what has been taught about the causes of modern warfare, in our history lessons, and by notable political leaders, is conventional fraud, when it is not outright stupidity, like that of President Bush himself.
To be fair to that President, we must concede that he rarely knows the actual meaning of the words coming out of his mouth. It often appears, that he is to be seen on our television screens as gaping in wonder at the spectacle of that flow of words from that orifice. Nonetheless, he lied repeatedly, as a way of getting us into that war. That much conceded, whether he lied in the fashion of Vice-President Cheney's "Mortimer Snerd"-like wooden puppet, or otherwise, it has been just those lying words from his mouth which got us into an Iraq from which, it seems, more and more, that there is neither hope of victory, nor honorable escape, for as long as the "Bergen-Snerd" team of that Vice-President and his President remains in office.
So, it is the case, that impeachments, or a decent sort of timely resignation from office, as was used to settle the breakdown of government threatened by Nixon's continued incumbency, are on the tips of the tongues of more and more sensible political leaders of our nation today.
Under other circumstances, where decency permitted us to be more generous in our description of that poor President, we would then treat him gently, and view him charitably, as a poor fellow who could read neither a page, nor a map, nor, probably, distinguish between the two. He has, like all persons, his rightful place in the enjoyment of life, but the terrible price our nation has already paid for his mistakes in that office, shows all sentient beings that his personal right does not include the U.S. Presidency.
In any case, we must put the blame where it belongs. Those failings of that President are no excuse for the relevant behavior of the U.S.A. itself; the people of the U.S.A. can make no acceptable evasion of the fact of their own guilt, if it were only the great guilt in allowing such a wretched incompetent as poor George W. Bush, Jr., to be seriously considered by them as a contender for election as President. When the people stop blaming Washington as much as they do, and blame their own cowardly political evasion of a citizen's responsibility more, the challenge might be quickly addressed.
The fact remains, that what the U.S. public, up to very high ranks in office, have been swindled into believing about modern warfare in general, is not merely deliberately misleading hokum. What they have been told, is the proverbial big lie. These poor people of ours, in general, soaked in cheap and tawdry forms of entertainment, have recently shown little or no comprehension of the actual nature of the world in which they live. Even notable Presidents of our republic, or heads of government abroad, have often mistaken their privileged familiarity with some among the sensitive predicates of current history for the actual subject of the long-ranging dynamics of history as such.
So, today's political idiot, like a character in a script by the utterly depraved Bertolt Brecht, marks his entry on the stage of current history, by babbling his lunatic sophist's chant, "I don't believe in conspiracy-theories."