Dear Greg,
Your questions are clearly rhetorical, but I'll treat them as
genuine questions nonetheless.
You wrote (to WSN):
>I am a little confused about the NWO definitions that Moore wrote
>about in his post yesterday: Specifically, the following:
>
> The "competitiveness" definition seems to say that 1st world
>countries are being forced by the NWO conspiracy to lower their
>standard of living to 3d world conditions, but the section following
>"globalization" seems to contradict this, saying that "globalization"
>leads to a greater disparity between the first and third worlds.
>
> Which is happening?
First-world popular prosperity/ welfare is trending downwards in
absoute terms. In many cases third world prosperity is declining even
faster, increasing the _relative_ disparity. Of course the third-world
picture is a bit more complex than that -- capital redeployment is ueven,
and there are pockets of prosperity (eg. elites in Brazil) embedded within
overall impoverishment, and there are some countries which will experience
general boom conditions for a time.
-----
> And I guess I should ask: Which is desirable from the Progressive
>point of view?
>
>After all, isn't the fact that jobs are moving to the third world a
>_desirable_ thing? If wages are decreasing in the first world, the
>have to be rising in the third world.
Not at all. Wages are not a zero-sum game. If a $12/hour job in
San Francisco becomes a $1/day job in Haiti, other things being equal, you
get $95/worker/day transferred to the corporate bottom line, and $1
transferred to the Haitian worker. The whole Perot emphasis on job
transfer as a nationalist issue was misguided -- it's not Mexico vs. U.S.,
it's corporations vs. people.
-----
>Perhaps I am interpreting the
>article incorrectly, but it seems the author's ideal situation is that of
>preventing third world countries from having producers, (i.e. no jobs,
>no producers) but sending aid money to be used for high levels of
>consumption (of first world products) in the third world.
Eh? This dichotomy is entirely your own, and essentially asks us
to choose among versions of imperialism. My "ideal situation" would
involve national self-determination (including domestic ownership of
natural resources), with economic organization oriented around sound
management and development of national resources (as has been _somewhat_
exemplified by post-war Japan), and carried out under genuine democracies
(which Japan has not at all exemplified).
-----
> I think you hit the right note on the Conservative vs. Liberal swap
>of meanings. I was reading an account of the issues that liberals
>espoused in the 1870-1920 time frame: Free Trade, Curtailment of
>government power, Resisting Leviathan etc...... It seems Liberals are
>now conservatives, and conservatives liberals - makes the language
>most confusing, don't you think?
Context is all important. For example, a progressive might be for
devolution, as a means to enhance the responsiveness of an already
democratic system. But in the face of corporate hegemony, devolution only
weakens representative government vis a vis corporate power, and is hence
to be generally eschewed by enlightened progressives. "Liberal" and
"Conservative" are both essentially meaningless in today's context --
they're primarily used as rhetorical labels -- for their positive or
negative emotional connotative power.
-----
> Speaking of which, do you really
>think _Thatcher_ and _Reagan_ were plugging for less government
>sovereignty? The democracy part maybe I could buy, but you do
>remember the dustup over the EU....?
Thatcher & Reagan both supported a transfer of sovereignty from
representative government to corporations. But while Reagan was a
cue-sheet-reading PR puppet, with no principle to be compromised nor will
to be challenged, Thatcher was a principled individual of consequence, who
happened to believe in the Ayn-Randian/ Friedmanesque/ neo-liberal party
line. But she was also a nationalist, and accurately perceived Maastricht
to be a sovereignty transfer of a new and different kind. At that point,
her usefulness to the corporate elite was at an end, and her dispatch was
prompt.
-----
>One more nitpick: Who are these long-term strategic deep-thinker
>"NWO Strategists? If they are corporate managers, are they the
>same guys who are always being castigated as not being able to look
>beyond the next quarterly performance review? Is it what we
>laughingly call our President?
I imagine you know the answer to this as well as I do, and you
could possibly be one of those "deep thinkers" yourself. They are not
corporate line managers and they are not political figureheads. The useful
literature on this topic is immense, one of my favorite being Greider's
"Who Will Tell the People?". At the top of my current reading pile happens
to be the April 15 issue of The Washinton Spectator, entitled "Washington's
Conservative Think Tanks Influence Government Policy", which enumerates:
-The Heritage Foundation
-The Sara Mellon Scaife Foundation
-The Smith Richardson Foundation
-The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
-The Adolph Coors Foundation
-The David Koch & Charles Koch Foundation
-The Noble Foundation
-The Howard Pew Freedom Trust
-The Bechtel Foundation
-The Lilly Endowment
The focus of this WS issue is not elite planning per se, but only
propaganda generation. There are other think tanks and "study groups"
which focus more on corporate-elite strategy. You tell me -- who dreamed
up and sponsored GATT?
Cheers,
Richard