Globalization
                          Versus 
Our Internal Combustion Economy


A Short History of the Recent Economic Past

   The greatest economic peculiarity of our time is the rise of globalization. Historically, like all national economies, the American economy is integrated vertically, from top to bottom, feeding from the bottom up and back down again, money rising to the top shelf of the system, money rising to money, which then theoretically invests a proportion of its profits back into the American economy to spur the next generation's growth.  This has meant the upper echelon of the American economy has always been dependent on the rest of society for its revenues, generally speaking, in sales, labor, productivity, educational skills and innovation.  
   To be sure those at the top haven't always graciously understood or accepted this responsibility.  Money and business, dying for short term profits, have often been brought kicking and screaming to accept their social responsibilities, like investing in education, defense and social welfare.  This is due to a glaring distinction in time frame between business profits and national interests.  Business profits are calculated short term whereas national interests must be weighed over the long haul.  This accounts for the historic tension between business seeking short term maximization of profits and a responsible government seeking long term reinvestment in the nation for the benefit of all.
   But it is precisely when this social altruism is properly balanced between present and future by good government that the next generation's prosperity is assured.  The achievement of this balance through tax investment and worker benefits and wages is what spurs investment and development, generates the greatest national prosperity which eventually flows back into the coffers of business and assures the greatest wealth for the greatest number of people.  This is what has led to the extraordinary advancement of our national wealth and well being and up until recently has helped make the United States the most prosperous nation in the world.  
   Therefore, to the extent business doesn't care about long term investment in the nation, the rest of us must.
    Globalization severs this shared domestic responsibility.  It is a horizontally integrated, high dollar, multinational system that tends to break apart the intricate connection and interdependency of national economies.  Today a global international corporation can actually be incorporated in the United States and have little shared interests with the health and well being of the rest of the American economy.  Customers to its wholesale and retail businesses needn't be well educated, healthy and content in the way that was more necessary (even if not always acknowledged) when these customers also comprised the work force from which its employees would be drawn.  Now as the world grows smaller, even if American worker skills and education and health decline, jobs may simply be outsourced overseas in a way that in a previous era would have been quite impossible.
    Of course, where the influx of such an abundant pool of phenomenally cheap labor is an ideal situation for corporations, it is not necessarily beneficial in any respect except backhandedly for the American economy.  Even as we're being told how good it is for consumers to see cheaper goods it is also true that as pay scales and benefits are cut to this same population as we move from a production to a service economy, they will have less and less disposable income to spend on these cheaper consumer goods.  
   At best the costs and benefits to consumers cancel out.  But the one result which is not in doubt is that the basic prosperity of the middle class stagnates while wealth is redirected upwards as profits to corporations soar.  This new type of prosperity, rather than providing more resources to rebuild our economy actually lessens the incentive for these corporations to invest back in America.  This has caused the disparity between classes in this society, after narrowing for nearly a century, to begin to dramatically widen once more.  This is what we are seeing happen in our economy today.
  
   This is not a short term trend. As globalization and modernization continue, worker insecurity and worker disposability will increase as every worker in America is going to see, if they haven't already, their job shopped to the lowest bidders overseas.   This will threaten the shared prosperity our democracy has been built on. Competing internationally means the American workers' real wages must level off or decline even as they watch their services be cut and benefits their parents took for granted become too expensive to be afforded.    
   To say this threatens the previous equation of prosperity which gauged a highly paid work force and full service, cradle to grave economy as a fundamental ingredient of a developed nation and of our democracy, is an understatement.  This new world system which sees high wages and benefits as a liability to competitiveness is bound to undercut our own prosperity at home.  The danger is real and already partially realized.  We already see that the upper economic echelon of society no longer appreciates the need to invest in the future of the United States as a key component to their own prosperity, but are merely treating the American people as just another generic group to be plundered and sold to.  
   These trends can only continue to grow worse, until the vast disparity which exists between wages and benefits in the third world and our own have leveled off and stabilized.  At what level of reduced economic prosperity and security these world economic pressures will settle and equalize is not yet clear, but undoubtedly our quality of life will diminish far faster than the third world's will rise.  It remains to be seen whether they will rise to our level at all or whether we will just sink to theirs.  But, since business is in charge of wage scales and will do everything to resist wage and benefit increases, our real wages and benefits will undoubtedly decline faster than the wages and benefits to third world workers climb.
   It is not alarmist to say that it may well be fifty years or several generations before wages and benefits in the US bottom out vis a vis the rest of the world and may start to rise again.  The effect of this is that the last century of generalization of wealth and benefits we have achieved in this country is in severe jeopardy. Obviously by the time this global retrenchment has run its course, most people in this society will have suffered certain and perhaps even severe economic consequences, including seeing their basic quality of life and every benefit we have come to believe to be our birthright as Americans much eroded.  At the same time, the economic disparity between those few who may profit from globalization versus the majority who will be victimized by it, will greatly expand.
  
    This is not exactly new.  We've seen such an economic disconnection before with the populist movement in the 1890's.  While the power brokers and credit owners on the East Coast were benefiting from industrialization, most of the country west of the Mississippi and south of the Mason Dixon was still agrarian in nature. The bank dominated society of the cities and coasts allied with religious elements (who espoused hard work and considered credit immoral) along with all the most prominent political and journalistic opinion, to dismiss everyone who was missing out on the prosperity they were reveling in as whiners, not worthy of paying attention to.  
   Government refused to take any action to alleviate these disparities in distribution of wealth.  And bankers refused to ease or accommodate lines of credit to account for the vagaries of weather and unpredictability of markets that made agriculture so unpredictable to farmers and the small businesses and producers that depended on them.  The agrarian society demanded, and were ignored, some sort of enduring credit system which could be persistent, and ride them through changing weather cycles, not based on year end accounting methods which made sense to corporate finance, but did not operate well in the real world of the rest of the country.
    Much later, catching up well after the fact, economic and social historians, with better economic models and analytical methods at their disposal, actually reconstructed what it was that the west and south had been complaining about.  Then it was seen that the part of the country that was not prospering from dominance in manufacturing, was suffering in the throes of depressed prices and a deep and several decade long recession.  
   After the populist movement was absorbed and watered down by William Jennings Bryant and the Democrats, a few reforms were made by Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the century to bring the most egregious and obvious abuses of the trusts and big money interests slightly in line.  But by and large the domination and devotion to capital and business continued to imbalance the prosperity of the nation until the late twenties when the great crash led to the Great Depression.   
   Only from this dire extremity did real reform designed to benefit everyone else in the country who had not profited directly from the manufacturing trade and the trusts begin to be instituted.  Hard won unionization, tax reform and social security were belated attempts to spread the wealth over a larger share of the American economy.  The success of these movements abetted by intelligent people and family based government programs led directly to the American century of great shared economic prosperity.  The set of reforms instituted by the second Roosevelt inarguably eventuated in the greatest and most democratically shared national economic prosperity in the history of the world.
   That economy, however, as experienced throughout the twentieth century was still vertically oriented, which is to say, no one doubted the economy's essential dependence on the health and well being of the American people.  As high tech globalization has begun to take hold, however, and the old manufacturing base of the US has been dismantled with barely a forward looking thought to the consequences or any clear idea of what would replace the old economy, the old verities of economic structure have begun to shake.  
    Now we are seeing a powerful new coalition of bad politicians, fueled by massive contributions of globally generated capital to their campaign coffers, and new multinationally oriented businesses trying to disassemble the basis of that very prosperity which led directly to our becoming the world's most powerful nation. We are beginning to see an old similar pattern of social rigidification and economic stratification beginning to emerge today that looks a lot like the 1890-1930's.  
   Today the companies which comprise the Dow Jones and that move the top of the stock market, with employees and sales and investment in new plant and equipment as likely to be overseas as here, have decided they have little to do with the underlying intrinsic economic health of the American people, and are avid to cut their ties of commitment to reinvestment back in the health of the American economy. To them the American economy, though large, has become just another market for globalized American business to victimize rather than the only market and the one on which all their future prosperity depends.   
   Of course, in its compliant and shiftless way, like dogs in heat if sex were money, always anxious to be of assistance in doing the wrong things when it pays them to do so, our government is doing its part trying to roll back a sense of shared profit in our integrated economy.  They are undoing the equality quotient in the tax code and ripping apart the social contract of public welfare and private responsibility for investment back into the economy as fast as they can.  
    Therefore as we see today, even as the stock market reaches new levels, opinion polls continue to show that the majority of the people in the country feel themselves growing poorer against the mean and becoming more pessimistic as to their economic future.  Just as they did at the end of the nineteenth century, lawmakers, bankers and business people that comprise the power structure in this country are ignoring these real concerns.   Instead, as they continue to marvel at how resilient the economic growth is for large corporations and their shareholders, real wages and benefits are stuck in stasis or in actual decline for the majority of people in the country.   
   Unless this economic growth is being shared in equally and proportionately and not just artificially inflated by global forces not truly reflective of the economic health and prosperity of the United States, it does not translate into real economic power for the United States.  What good is a good American economy for America that doesn't help most Americans?  
   Actually, as things stand today, as many Americans have understood, the growth of the global economy does not necessarily comport in the short run with the best long term interests of the United States.  This is the ultimate disconnection, when international economic growth, no matter what the Dow Jones says or how high the stock market rises, no longer necessarily equates to the domestic health and economic equilibrium and growth of our domestic economy.  More and more, in fact, these two economic forces, horizontal and vertical, are working at cross purposes to each other. Unless and until this wealth is properly shared among a larger percentage of Americans its benefits will not be as beneficial to the United States as is presupposed.
    This doesn't mean, of course, that we should or even could ever try to curtail internationalism.  But it will require much more intelligent thought and conscious effort by our policy makers to analyze the effects that globalization is wreaking on our own economy to account for the pressures and inequities that necessarily accompany it.  And then sound policies must be instituted to mitigate these harmful effects.  
   Unfortunately, driven by greed, graft, ignorance and campaign finance abuse, instead of ameliorating these economic shocks our politicians are mindlessly making them worse.  With a remarkable sense of the inappropriate, our political class has been doing exactly everything they can possibly do to increase on their part the disparity between rich and poor in this country at the very same time the natural effects of globalism are depressing the poor and rendering the wages of the middle class stagnant.  This means, of course, despite the high price of our stocks, we are not just not maintaining the status quo but our economy is losing ground in real wealth to the rest of the world.  
   They blandly accept the easy excuse by pretending to believe that by blindly helping the world economy, i.e., the big businesses in whose back pockets they comfortably reside, it must somehow always obliquely help the US economy.  Clearly this is not always true.  
    In fact our government's policies set up a neat double squeeze on the vast majority of Americans.  At the very same time most American have seen their job security put on the line, their pensions destroyed and their health care and education and social security costs rising to prohibitive levels, they have been forced to watch as their jobs are being put up for sale to the lowest bidders overseas and stand by as their high paying jobs are being replaced with low paying menial ones.  Meanwhile, our tax code is being increasingly, religiously rigged against them by a profligate and dishonest political class even as executive wages and the affluent see their wages explode while having their taxes cut.  This is malfeasance, incomprehension and corruption across the board.  
   So as they see their wages decline in real dollars most Americans must watch as their expenses rise, set against a backdrop of predatory pricing and price gouging and monopolies and steady minimization of opportunity and quality of life.  This will work a slow impoverishment on all of us and the American economy in general.  For most Americans these dual economic pressures are tantamount to a homeowner having to adjust to the rainfall pouring in on him after their roof is blown off by a powerful storm then having to endure the local politician coming by to thoughtfully flood their basement too.
 
The Myth and Math of Free Markets

    In this day and age or any day and age when a complexity is reduced to an irreducible phrase and accepted as perceived wisdom and embraced as a theological certainty by the entire power structure of a society that then merely repeats it mindlessly in response to changing events - you can be pretty certain that it is completely wrong.  So, leaning on such a shibboleth of convenience that "free markets always benefit the American economy" is not only myth, it is dangerously shallow escape from reality.
    So it is that when we are told that free markets are good for our economy in every circumstance whatever their effects, this is a fallacy.  Free markets may be usually good, often good, quite probably good more often than not, but not always good.
    In fact, unlike what is generally believed today, every nation begins its drive to economic prominence as a tightly knit and highly protected economy.  Like an internal combustion engine, it has to heat up and grow in horsepower internally before it can deliver the pressure to actually move the vehicle down the road a piece.  Therefore when economic specialists sponsored by the US in recent years were sent to preach open markets to Latin America or to Russia or to the former nations of the fallen Soviet Empire, they were not only dooming these countries to fail but to economic subservience to more developed countries or multinational corporations which were already dominant in their fields.
    That's why their free markets policies have born little fruit for the nations which adopted them and why these analysts and advisors have been discredited and run out of the countries in which they were operating. Worse, since these false free market ideas have been loosely and vaguely tied to notions of openness and freedom and democracy as well, these profound concepts have been tainted with this same foul odor of shallow failure.
   Our understanding of economic history is not very long or deep.  Of the three greatest economic powers of the last several hundred years that we can clearly analyze, each has been tightly controlled accompanying their rise to economic power.  These are Britain, the United States and Japan.  
   Briefly, Britain was an island. We tend to discount this today as a necessary feature of its formulation but this was actually crucial in developing its economic independence which was then slowly expanded along sea lanes into colonial ports around the globe.  The system which resulted was self contained and protectionistic by design.
   Japan also happened to be an island and was notoriously protectionistic as it rose to the world's second greatest economy.  
   The United States, the greatest power in the world since the end of the British Empire, was also, in essence, an island, albeit a large and continental one.  Surrounded on either side by wide oceans from any well established economy that could compete with it, it grew unchallenged by outside competition.  At the same time, with its abundant natural resources and ever expanding markets, it developed not only the most powerful but also the most thoroughly self contained and protected "free" market in the world.  Though preaching free and open markets, the US never actually needed the structure of laws to manage its period of economic incubation, because its geography protected it from international competition.  
    We therefore have not understood our own heritage, that it was geography that closed our markets and not laws which kept them open, that was the greatest determinative feature of our rise to economic prominence on the world stage.
    The lesson here is that free and open markets only service a nation when it has already developed a strong economically competitive position or has particular advantages, such as unusual natural resources within open markets which allow it to compete more effectively in a given area of production.  One example of this, for instance, might be the natural resources and size of Germany versus its European neighbors which allowed it to industrialize a pace ahead of its European neighbors and obtain a temporary domination.
    Free markets are actually more usefully thought of as the second phase of economic domination, not the first.  Because once it has already proved itself better able to compete in the marketplace, it serves these nations to compete in all the areas in which they already owns a strong competitive position.  In the case of Britain and the United States, full service economies able to compete on a wide and comprehensive array of economic activity, this free market competition may lead to world economic domination.
    Because the second stage on the way to world or regional economic domination is opening markets once you are sure you can win the economic competition. This capital return which ensues only enhances their already proven economic advantages.  In the case of Britain and the US this allowed a return on their economic domination which enabled them to become hubs of world economic activity, encompassing banking, finance, stock markets, capital investment, etc.  Japan, on the other hand, because its protectionism was partially artificial rather than entirely geographic, was unable to open its structural and institutional regulatory procedures wide enough to adequately dismantle its protectionism to invite this reinvestment of the world back into its own economy.  This has led to a faltering of its forward economic progress.
    China, of course, is the new star rising.  Its markets are closed and are only slowly opening themselves up to competition in areas in which they can reasonably expect to compete - generally dependent on cheap and abundant labor.  A managed economy, even one with as large an internal market as China possesses, is difficult to manage properly.  The valves have to be opened and the gears engaged just right at the proper time.  So far, in a general way, China has managed well the mechanical levers between protectionism and openness.  
   However, if their left hand is political control and the right is economic openness, it remains to be seen whether they will have the self discipline to loosen the reins held in the left hand to allow the strengthening of the reins of the right.  This balance between openness and protectionism must be regulated properly if they are to navigate their way through their temporary opening in the world economic horse race long enough to avoid pulling up short and killing it off.  So far, their left hand is clearly so much stronger than their right that it is hard to see how at some point their economic growth will not be stunted in favor of maintaining their political control. This will choke off the economic freedom necessary to fully expand their economy to its full amazing potential.  This obviously, is the very hurdle the Soviet Union was never able to leap.

   There is a little known third phase to economic development which, because of lack of study and statistical analysis is hard to find a successful example of.  It is rare to history.  In our brief survey, of our three focus countries of Japan, Britain and the US, only Britain has gone far enough to come face to face with this third phase of economic growth and development.  Unfortunately when Britain did face this barrier, it failed to surmount it.
    The distinguishing feature of this phase of economic development arrives when it become cheaper (perceptually, at least) and more profitable to invest outside your home economy than to reinvest back into it.  This is the fateful point of no return at which Britain failed and at which the US finds itself today.  You don't have to be a genius or old school mercantilist to understand that, when the outflow from a nation's economy is consistently much greater than its intake, its future has passed it by and it's on its way to its economic past.  What works economically in micro systems works in macro economics as well.  Therefore this law also applies to businesses and home finance.  When your expenditures consistently exceed your revenues you have already passed over the fateful divide toward diminished economic return.
    There is no need to go into all the variables here, some of them, like trade deficits and budget deficits, are obvious and well known.  These are not conclusive in and of themselves but only symptomatic of a nation increasingly unable to pay its bills.  Similarly our new lack of commitment to education, health and social welfare, areas in which we once led the world, shows a strong disinclination to invest back into our own economy, our infrastructure and our people.  The undertow of these problems is, as it always is, glossed over with an unseemly conspicuous consumption and luxury and extravagance, like a candle flaring in its last throes, of the unlimited prosperity and growing profligacy of the very well to do.  
   These are all signs of trouble.  The maintenance of all our economic necessities, areas in which we once led the world, is suffering.  Before our very eyes, over the last thirty years, we have lagged from being the best run country to an also ran, well on our way to becoming a not very well run country at all.  Our can-do society has been replaced with a can't do, won't do, hardly even try or care any more era of American leadership.
   That our increasingly crass and corrupt political system is either unwilling or unable to correct itself to address these issues, speaks to an aging society so addicted to luxury loving and perversely sloppy behavior that it can probably not correct itself.  At the very least, it's clear that we're no longer able to support our excesses with the hard work that can possibly justify the extravagance with which we are currently indulging ourselves.
 
    To repeat the essential point, however, it's when a nation's own investment starts to flow away from reinvestment back into itself, that its decline becomes inevitable.  In Britain this eventuated in more and more private capital flowing away from the British Isles to its colonies and more and more treasury money being spent in support and protection of its overseas resources than they were able to generate to replenish the treasury.  This included a number of unnecessary wars which generated costs far in excess of any benefit to the nation.  This especially served Britain no purpose when the Empire dried up and the mother country became dowager to its own wayward children.  They were respectful of the mother country, perhaps, but at least the last fifty years of British prosperity was misdirected to its colonies, because it was never reinvested back into Britain itself.
    The United States seems to be repeating rather than learning from these short sighted policies.

Internal Combustion Capitalism

   A national economy may be thought of as an internal combustion engine.  It's an entirely interrelated whole.  Its aggregate wealth is how much gas an economy has in its tank.  As credit and investment capital this measures how far the vehicle of the economy may go on its previously accumulated resources.
    Air to the carburetor is the freedom and vigor of a society which allows for openness, and the combustion of enterprise to take place, protected against the outside air of international competition.  It suffers a recession of efficiency when the oxygen supply is inhibited or smothered by the dirty air filter of corruption, over regulation, monopoly, bad trade management and overly dogmatic, bribed or inept government.  Yet there may also be too much of a good thing, as well, as either too much gas or too much oxygen may flood the economic engine and bring it to an inflationary stall.  
    This not to say there is no friction in progress, naturally there is.  That's why lubrication is necessary to govern the moving parts.  Where the pistons aren't tightly machined, in a system which is either too loosely regulated or too tightly controlled, the individual parts still must be kept free enough to move and yet not get so loose that they risk becoming unbolted and flying into one another.  When the system is tightly governed and tuned up, oil, in the form of free debate and competition regulated by the proper governmental oversight, distribution and management, keeps the gears from grinding and the system moving smoothly. Even then an unclean carburetor will gunk up the works and choke the system with acrimony, expelling only black smoke through the exhaust of the sputtering engine.  
    Finally there is the electrical charge which ignites the spark of disposable income and consumer purchase and investment.  This is most adversely affected by the distribution of money influenced by taxes and overregulation, monopoly, fraud, inequality and lack of real competition, compounded with low wages, putrid benefits and pensions and nonexistent job security.  In other words, even if everything else in the economy is properly calibrated, if the spark of financial security, disposable income and economic vitality is not properly regulated the car still won't start.  A corrupt tax code and lack of investment back in the human resources of the nation is like moisture on the spark plugs of a bad ignition - that without which nothing else runs.
    Like Detroit, in our economy today Congress has decided to go with the flash of gas guzzlers and the quick, short term profit of large, inefficient and poorly designed vehicles, while avoiding the nuts and bolts of a good, fuel efficient, dependable product that will bring predictable long term gain.  They are gutting the quality of the engine and the engineering in favor of quick profits and high returns generated by the luxuriousness of the upholstery and the sleekness of the packaging.
    In our economy this means that the bottom is being squeezed on behalf of the top.  Like a giant, inflamed red pustule, great wealth is like the zit on the butt of the rest of the economy.  Extravagant wealth and conspicuous consumption are not symptoms of economic health but of sickness, festering endlessly until the purple pimple predictably bursts.  Not all wealth is bad, of course.  Wealth which is derived from hard work and real production and is invested as a percentage back into the country is the life's blood of our prosperity.  But that money which is plundered not from hard work but from bribing politicians for unfair advantage, or from exorbitant executive wages, or corrupt tax policy which is then placed in offshore accounts or overseas investment serves us nothing and is more a sign of the infirmity of our economy than its well being.  When all policy is devoted to the succor and slavery of the very rich it diminishes the prosperity of everyone else in society and eventually will even affect the prosperity of the most wealthy among us as the future wealth of the nation is curtailed across the board.
    Any economy which isn't fully integrated to the well being of all its citizens isn't worthy of being called a good national economy.  What good is it to Americans in having a good American economy that doesn't work to the benefit of all Americans?  With this in mind, in this day and age, there is an elemental justice to economic activity which must be maintained, a safety net for all.  By definition, since we are all equal, a democracy is only as strong as its weakest citizens.  
   A few of the principles on which this country's prosperity depend include: a minimum wage that is a living wage.  Good and available medical care, good free basic education for everyone, etc.  We have come to rely on social security, the paying ahead of one generation to aid the previous in the extremity of its old age.  We cannot afford to regress from standards we have previously achieved and held ourselves to.  
   The national economy must in fact benefit everyone in the nation, not equally, to be sure, we are a long way from Utopia, but at least minimally.  A democracy resides in the strength and well being of its own people, no where else, and it has been proven when we invest in them equally, which is their due under the constitution, with equal rights for all, is when the nation, healthy and well educated and free, performs best.  
    Unfortunately we have begun to scrimp on all these necessities of a free people and an open society.  A good economy is like a well run circus, it only appears disorganized.  Real life in America needn't be an eternal high wire act filled with jesters and ballerinas and acrobats crashing to the ground, heavy on the clowns, as elephants run amok among the audience and the tigers of poverty are set loose to menace our poorest children.  There is no need for this safety net to be broken down.  Those who say we can't afford this minimal investment in our own future are wrong, we can't afford not to make this investment in our own people.  
   This is where the greed quotient enters.  Those who are willing to infringe on the long term health and possibility of this country merely to line their pockets in the here and now with a few extra bucks, have set themselves in charge of our country.  You can see their reflection in the eyes of the homeless and in the stagnant wage scale of the middle class, in our diminishing prosperity and in a thousand and one other variables which speak to the creation of a permanent underclass (which implies a permanent anti-democratic overclass), which represents regression across the board for our economic health and future.
    They arouse previously discredited theories to justify their self-interested greed.  They say that the privileged are more wealthy because they are more worthy than other Americans. They claim that the private sector will somehow spontaneously rouse itself to solve all the welfare problems of society and establish a net of social welfare that their scissors of corruption have consciously shredded.  This is specious.  It is disproven by history.  The reason the government social welfare netting was erected in the first place was precisely because the necessity for it had become so abundant clear.  In these economic times why would it be less necessary?  
    Churches and faith based organization do a remarkable amount of unselfish good work, but this demonstrably insufficient.  For all the sporadic good will in the world will never be enough to ensure the well being of those trampled underfoot of the forward march of progress led by bad government and the amoral capital of careless globalization.  Only sound government policy in control of real economic power can ensure that the bottom fifth of our society is not always in danger of catastrophic failure.  And as the ranks of the poor expands upward it becomes more clear by the day that the second and third lowest tiers of society are not all that secure from falling through the cracks of our society themselves.
 
   The point of this paper is that the United States is currently beset with a double problem. Globalization is placing unprecedented pressure on our wages, benefits and jobs in this country at the very same time our political class, unforgivably influenced by big money, is pursuing divisive and outmoded policies not seen in this country since prior to the Great Depression.  This is the real problem with globalization that our political system has done nothing to address but much to exacerbate. They are helping big money destroy the equitability, accountability and responsibility of money to reinvest back into our own greatest asset and resource - our own people.