The last couple of posts by me did not make it to the list. I suspect
that the reason was simple: I used the wrong e-mail address for
posting. I apologise to list members for the confusion, and to Ed for
any inconvenience this may have caused him.
John McLaren
---
Hello Ed,
This is a very able and well-considered reply by any standard. I
particularly enjoyed the understatement and ridicule which were
tactful, as rhetorical humour should be, and not without the
intended effect, I hope. You deserve no less, with a tip of the hat.
What I most appreciated in this riposte was the precision and
complete lack of pretension -- except for the permissible facetiae,
of course -- with which you laid out your case.
The differences that matter most, it seems to me, may have to do
with
the drivers of globalism -- the extent to which western
governments (Canada in particular) are agents or merely
reagents;
the extent to which divers motive forces are univocal, or so
disparate as not to be conceptually monolithic;
whether the liberalisation of trade at the price of sovereign
powers and beyond the reach of electors is a good thing;
whether civil society is compatible with the exercise of
supranational trade, financial and economic policy authorities
under the aegis of a colonial power reincarnate and its
surrogates is a good thing, even with codicils on minimum
social and environmental standards, and if so, whether no
taxation without representation applies only in the US of A;
whether the public of any civil society calling itself democratic
can legitimately be subjugated to a socio-economic instrument
or authority not of its own deliberate and perpetual choosing,
except by ratification following public debate;
whether those who oppose corporate colonialism should rip the
labels from everything they don't understand, so that they will
understand better, without the hindrance of conceptual
thought;
whether they should give up coffee;
whether, assuming I did have a better command of the facts,
Maude Barlow is really a cult leader without a surplice; or,
if I don't have a better command of the facts, whether you
would be willing to lend me your economics library for a year or
two.
John McLaren
There is hardly any need to append my original reply-post to Ed,
since he quoted generously from it. But it is appended for reference
(with slight snips).
----
I know the program you refer to but missed the episode. I simply can't
be so generous as Keith. I was astonished. My jaw dropped.
On 7 Sep 2000, at 12:13, Edward R Weick wrote:
<snip>
> Since I heard this, I've been thinking about why governments no
> longer appear to be able to set rules. <snip>
>
> But the point was not about small and weak governments. It was
> about governments of large and relatively wealthy nations. In my
> opinion, it's not so much that their powers have been diminished in
> an absolute sense. They are still very much in power domestically.
Agreed. They've become far more repressive.
> It's just that, within the past few decades, new technology has
> caused the environment in which all governments must operate to
> become "globalized" or "transnationalized" to an extent never
> possible before, and has greatly increased the overall quantum of
> power that is up for grabs.
Surely this is naive. Technology is not the cause, but the
instrument of globalism.
> In a global sense, there has been a relative shrinkage of
> government powers, which are necessarily contained by boundaries and
> entrenched institutions, and a relative growth of the powers of less
> constrained interests which can operate outside of defined borders
> or national laws.
Agreed. The powers are called transnationals.
> Moreover, governments, especially democratic governments, are slow
> and ponderous in their procedures, and not always able to react as
> quickly as they should, even if they do have some insights into what
> they should be doing.
>
Codswallop. Governments are the lackeys -- the agents of
globalisation. There is nothing reactive about their posture, they are
promoting it.
> Governments have tried to cope with this new reality by creating
> institutions such as the WTO and negotiating agreements such as the
> MAI.
Contrafactual, I'm sure. You make it sound as though western
"democracies" are on the defensive somehow, when they, especially this
country, are in the vanguard of corporate colonialism.
> This has necessarily meant permitting the intrusion of the
> transnational or global into domestic affairs, further diminishing
> the powers of specific governments
Bullshit. There's nothing "necessarily" about the intrusion, which is
calculated. But respectfully, since I agree with Keith on one thing
and one thing only: Your posts are usually well-considered.
> What all of this might mean ultimately is still anybody's guess. My
> own is that it will necessarily result in moving key aspects of
> governance to higher levels of aggregation,
Key aspects? Such as the rules by which wealth is distributed, no
doubt. Such as whether a society will be civil or socially Darwinian,
I would say.
> governments will increasingly come to recognize that the only way to
> effectively influence and constrain transnational trends is to
> relinquish some of their powers and combine them with the
> relinquished powers of others. Through the WTO, they have already
> gone a considerable distance toward this in the field of economics.
Economics has nothing to do with the global feeding frenzy.
Economics is about the management of wealth. Globalisation is
about the accumulation and concentration of wealth.
> As many critics of "globalization" point out, they now have to
> start doing it with regard to environmental, labour, and quality of
> life standards.
What governments have to start doing is to govern in the public
interest, not bind themselves to minimum standards in worldwide
trade agreements.
> A major question with regard to all such fields is whether they can
> do it with the necessary speed.
Eyewash. The speed with which governments are yielding sovereign
powers is mind-boggling.
> A second question, perhaps equally important, is whether they can do
> it rationally and not morally; that is, without imposing their
> standards and values on others. I say this because several
> participants in last night's program appeared to weigh in from a
> moral perspective. To Maude Barlow (who participated in the
> discussion to the point of almost preventing anyone else from
> speaking), "transnational corporations" were the quintessential
> evil, and anything that could be done to stop them was good.
Barlow is right. Ed, wake up and smell the coffee. Globalisation is a
giant tarantula which survives by sucking the lifeblood out of the
so-called developing world. It does this by means of a financial
system, which is run by a cartel of developed nations in bondage to
transnational corporations. Western democracies simply feed the
world's natural resources to the insatiable beast for the profit of
transnationals and for whatever middens may be left over for the
growing number of scavengers who play the markets. The speculators
roll the dice, virtually tax-free, with the blessing of regimes that
cover themselves with what Galbraith called the rich cloak of
democracy -- the tyranny of an electoral majority who are immune to
any appeal that smacks of simple social justice.
Let me repeat. I respect you for your habitually well-considered
views. This was not one them. I consider it an aberration.
>
> Ed Weick (613) 728-4630
>
--
John McLaren
Free Anti-spam service: http://www.brightmail.com
