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Globalization: Those Outside the Hall
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Globalization
Those Outside the Hall
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by Sean Gonsalves
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"I am here to learn and to listen from voices to those inside this hall and to those outside this hall who want to join us in this constructive dialogue," President Bush said at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec over the weekend.
It's too easy (and mean) to constantly harp on the glaring irony of a man who calls for higher standards in education and, although he never gives an extemporaneous speech, is apparently incapable of uttering a grammatically correct sentence in public. There's a charming down-home, ebonic quality to his speaking style. I like it.
Of course, this is of minimal interest - or should be anyway - to anyone other than a linguist.  There be more important things to occupy our attention.
Good thing for Bush there was a moratorium on reporters' questions in effect at the summit. Otherwise some silly journalist might have asked: "Mr. President, seeing as how you and your supporters pride yourselves on being the moral exemplars of integrity (and let's face it, integrity matters more than prepositions and grammar rules), when, where and how are you going to facilitate this 'constructive dialogue'?"
After all, even the poster boy for dishonesty - Bill "Fornigate" Clinton - in proposing a national dialogue on race, went beyond mere rhetoric and created an official forum for it. So how about it, Mr. Bush - why not set up an official forum, with genuine debate, focusing on "globalization"?
We won't hold our breath. On second thought, maybe we should. From the looks of it, we're going to need all the oxygen we can get with Dubya tossing out important environmental regulations like spears of broccoli on his father's plate.
"I just strongly disagree with them," Bush said of "those outside this hall," a.k.a. the protesters. His stated reason for disagreeing: "Some complain that despite our democratic gains, there is still too much poverty and inequality. Some even say that things are getting worse. For too many, this may be true. But the solution lies not in statism and protectionism. The solutions lies in more freedom."
To push past the doublespeak, it might be fruitful to ask: freedom for whom and for what?
A clue is provided by the guy The Wall Street Journal calls "one of Britain's leading public intellectuals." A well-known conservative political thinker who is said to have influenced Margaret Thatcher, John Gray "has decided that the conservative agenda is no longer viable."
Gray writes: "Mid-19th century England was the subject of a far-reaching experiment in social engineering. Its objective was to free economic life from social and political control and it did so by constructing a new institution, the free market, and by breaking up the more socially rooted markets that had existed in England for centuries."
This monumental change Karl Polyani dubbed "the Great Transformation." We are now witnessing the Great Forgetting, exporting a model of development that the prosperous United States never adhered to.
"The Utopia of the global free market has not incurred a human cost in the way that communism did. Yet over time it may come to rival it in the suffering that it inflicts," Gray continues - an observation put in milder terms even by one "inside this hall" at the Quebec summit.
"Until all the peoples of the Americas are free from hunger and fear of unemployment, we cannot celebrate the benefits of trade liberalization," said Kenny Anthony, prime minister of St. Lucia.
The free market that developed in mid-19th century Britain didn't happen by accident. And, contrary to New Right propaganda, it didn't spring from a long process of unplanned evolution. "It was an artifact of power and statecraft. In Japan, Russia, Germany and in the United States, state intervention has been a key factor in economic development," Gray writes.
"A precondition of the 19th-century British free market was the use of state power to transform common land into private property. This was engineering through the Enclosures... . Ideologues, such as (F.A.) Hayek, (the intellectual father of Reaganomics) who developed grand theories wherein market economies emerge by a slow evolution in which the state plays little role, not only generalized wildly from a single case, they misrepresented that case," he unveils.
The protesters may not be reading Hayek or Gray but they understand something that Bush and the "liberal" media choose not to. The former Thatcherite (of all people!) puts it succinctly:
"It is a matter of historical record that the free market began to wither away with the entry of the broad population into political life. As the more clear-sighted ideologues of the New Right have always recognized, the unfettered market is incompatible with democratic government."
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist.
Copyright © 2001 Cape Cod Times
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