U.S. trading partners have expressed concern that any move towards protectionism could spread and spark trade wars that could further worsen the economic crisis. Around the world, many are looking to President Barack Obama for leadership and feel that he is the one who can save the current global trading system. Does this system really work? Is it worth saving? International bodies such as the WTO and free trade deals like NAFTA, have fostered a climate of corporate dominance trapping nations in a web of treaties that in some cases, trump their own laws. The U.S. is being used as an engine for world government. The global elite seek to capitalize on the economic chaos which in many ways they engineered, in order to further restructure the world.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Trade-Wars-The-Rise-of-Pr-by-Dana-Gabriel-090204-269.html
Stumble It!
Almost every economic move Obama has made has been to uphold this illegitimate system. He never talks about abolishing the Federal Reserve which is anything but federal. This might be far too simplistic, but we really don't need the WTO or free trade deals to conduct trade with other nations. I know Obama says all the right things, but change sure seems to equal the status quo. IMHO.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13144
That neither the former Libeal government nor the present Conservative one have done or attempted to do anything close to what a "nothing" nation like Bolivia successfully accomplished, is the best indictor that they DO NOT WANT to see Canada as an independent entity.
I agree with yourself and Rick. This is not too simplistic a notion at all.
That said, the current economic and political system is now so deeply committed to this corporatist "globalization" concept, is into it so deep and now for so long, that it is not going to be turned back this side of capitalism, in my view. Capitalism, beginning sometime in the later postwar(WW2), certainly by the time of the rise of Reaganism and Neocon Reaganomics, though the early warning signs were there even earlier during the time of its first Red Menace fears, planted its flag and survival hopes in the delusional "post-nationalist" soil of transforming itself into a fully global system, as the only "Endless Growth" (in cheap labour and consumption) direction open to it.
Which is the hilltop advantage where it has no choice now, but to make its stand until the very end. There is no going back for the "corporate system" of capitalism.
The only hope of finessing this position now, for those who would and have no fear of or special "loyalty" to corporate capitalism, from my vantage point anyway, is to begin to go and look for advantage "outside" of the system. Its assumptions and position as the dominant global system enjoying the passive as much as active loyalty of "the citizenry" continues to need to be challenged. In place of its "competitive" system assumptions, which presume endless war as much as endless growth, needs to be interjected a realistic, but "co-operative" model possibility for the peoples of the world and their "national communities". This "co-operative" system holding out the possibility of evolving a quite different "global" reality and working mechanisms set. Which assumes the starting point reality of non-interference in the internal affairs of independent nations, and recognition of the absolute necessity for each to first develop their own fullest degree of self-sufficiency, and thereafter enter into "voluntary", non-military interventionist trading relations with each other, on the basis of "mutual", as opposed to imperialist "compulsion driven" interest.
Goddamn, I agree with that.
Coyote
Something like this could act to put a crimp in this particular form of "corporate planning". There's no doubt that things will get "nasty", either as a result of this "downturn" (sure has a euphemistic ring to it, no?), or the next. And when things get nasty, people get upset. So far, we're very quiescent -- but things are just starting......
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
Thanks for the link, Rick. An interesting read.
The big question in my mind now is, how is the extreme corporatist (fascist) right going to respond, when and as it comes to realize the full dimension of the danger to the very survival of the capitalist system itself?
For it is the answer to this question that is going to determine much, how the clash of ideas and solutions to get out of this mess of capitalism is going to go. If they go the "traditionalist" route of a Hitler or Mussolini, then, depending a great deal upon the reactions of "the masses" and to where they early throw their support (be it either passive or active), it could get very ugly indeed, and very suddenly. (I'd be working on a hidey hole plan now.)
How e're much they may currently appear totally off the wall, those prognosticating a US military coup especially, even a civil war and possible break-up of the Empire Homeland, may turn out to not be so crazy afterall.
As much as I hate being a negativist, or appearing the nihilist, it's true; I am not optimistic how this is going to evolve, especially in the short run.
(And while I am not an Obama fan per se, I do think he is "a decent man". I just hope he has a good security backup plan for himself and his family.)
Coyote
That said, thus far, I think he is probably or at least seems well meaning enough-, though no doubt, he is primarily, in my view, and to which he has lent himself, being used as a tool by the old ruling class boys network around him, and will sooner or later bend to their agenda, is already in many ways, or they will take him down. (Which is why, IF he is the "innocent" he would have us believe he is, I hope he has an "escape" plan, for himself and his family. Bush, from an old wealth ruling class family, could rely on the "presidential guard security system" to protect him. If the system/military ever moves against Obama however, he will NOT be able to trust it.)
Reasonably good people, which liquidity capital he still has some to spend, even with the likes of me, often get used for nefarious ends. It goes on all the time within capitalism.
Do I think he is going to "change" anything very serious about the nature of the US Empire Beast?
Not a fucking chance. He might as well have his erect phallus out an open window trying to fornicate with the world, for all the satisfaction he is going to give or get.
He's a currently popular symbol is all, primarily for Black Americans, but for "liberal" Whites as well, that in the end is only negatively about "equality" or Blacks having "arrived": but more that we are all, or a major percent of us, equally corruptible, just like Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin were/are for the "purist" assumptions of "some" women (and maybe some "metro sexual" men).
Still, we don't have to agree on everything either, bro. (Unless it turns out you are a woman too
Coyote
Obama is if anything a trailing indicator of change that has already happened in the US. I'm convinced that Americans were ready for years (decades perhaps) to elect a black president. They just didn't want it to have to be Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
And I frankly sometimes worry more about the "well-intentioned" leaders than the ones that are just plain "careerists". Government interventionism is based at least to some degree on a hubristic a conceit that no social or economic problems exists that can't be utterly defeated with a sufficient application of money (programs)...or force (social engineering). People who follow such thinking are more than willing to crush individual rights and liberties in pursuit of their utopia (or "just society", if you prefer a Canadian term). I can see all too often the mailed fist under the velvet glove of "compassionate" liberalism or socialism.
http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html
Not that I am always against wielding a velvet gloved mailed fist
Today, that is still how many "liberal/ mushy socialists" (like the NDP) tend to think about "socialism"... as a strong, centralized state... a benevolent dictatorship of sorts. The official "Communists" became the extreme, militant manifestation of this same tendency-, which everywhere, of course, led back to capitalism, over here and over there, because there was no real "class", "working class rule", but of simply a kind of "vanguard" intellectual elite that really felt, the working class per se could not be trusted with real "power". Which was the central point of the universe on which they actually agreed with capitalism. And indeed, most everywhere they came to power, by whatever means, in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, they have become the real capitalists there of our day, and the real power behind the so-called, but sham Dictatorship of the Proletariat State (China).
"The Left" in our time, the "Non_Statist Left", needs to and is in the process of reinventing itself as we speak, and out of this process hopefully, from my view of course, will emerge a vision and a working/lower class force with the mass and the will to actually move society beyond capitalism, into a "co-operative" and at least "more" egalitarian as opposed to destructively "competitive" socio-economic arrangement, in which these same working class stratas actually have the real, decisive, democratically rooted, "ruling" power... over the economy and other ruling structures of society. (They, the working class, are the real majority, and the majority should rule. Which doesn't mean without co-operation and worked out agreements/arrangements with the rest of "non-ruling class" stratas in society. And so long as they "behave themselves" the old ruling class can be peacefully "grandfathered" out of the picture, like they themselves did to the old landed aristocracy of feudalism. Otherwise, they make too much trouble...
And I have no illusions how difficult and fraught with danger this process is going to be. Much being determined, of course, by how everyone behaves/reacts to the times already in motion.
Modern human history has consisted largely of figuring out (and not very successfully) how to make small fit into large. I feel the original intent of the founding of the United States (al la Thomas Paine - who believed that government should be strictly ad hoc) may have achieved such a thing, had it not been hijacked by the Federalists ( http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers/ )who believed in the institutionalization and formalization of government.
That the latter easily won out is seen by our topsy turvy notion that the federal government (I am talking about Canada now) should be more powerful than the provincial governments, which in turn are more powerful than the municipal governments -- when it should be the other way around.
Actually, a brilliant observation, I think.
There IS a problem with a certain, necessary "intimacy" that we all desire should exist within "democracy" as society moves to ever greater and greater scale. And it is in part why, I think, you are right, there does have to "somewhat" be at least, a diminution of scale of human society. We have become just too, too much for the good of everything; the planet and the rest of life, including ourselves.
We are never going to be able to return to the tribal "village" again, I think. It is too much to expect. You are just not going to be able to keep them down on the farm, now that everyone has seen Pariee (Paris). The species stands or fails at the level of development where we are at, not where we've been.
It is regrettable somewhat, to be sure, but we still have to get as near as we can, back to that "village" sensibility, it seems to me. Which is going to involve some significant reductions in human population levels, while hanging onto the best features and opportunities that "technology" can give us, to simplify our lives and leave us with more "play time" than capitalist realities of "profit production/growth" demands afford us currently.
It is never going to be exactly the same, of course, but then neither, with the benefit of human technological achievement, does it have to be quite so fucking materially impoverished, with our faces driven into the relentless necessity of endless toil. And the democracy part, and the "intimacy", we will have to keep working on... making it better and better. Because somehow, it lies at the heart of what we are seeking, I think.
We're searching for an elusive "balance". (Like "perfection", ever pursued but never achieved?)
Coyote
ps
Gotta go feed that hoss/cayuse of mine, before it gets too, too dark.
One of the latest concepts involving city development is the "village-within-a-village" idea. We'll never get rid of the cities, for any number of reasons. But they CAN be made more livable, by dividing them up into "nodes". In other words, the opposite of the tendency to amalgamate into "supercities"..............
But of course, this would mean devolving responsibilities and accountability back onto the sholders of the citizenry at large...........something that politicians and big business will fight tooth and nail.