Good Evening Friends,

I am going to try to persuade you that globalization should be properly thought of: as the process that occurs when the economic elites (with the political elites being pulled along in tow) of leading world economic powers (in this case the United States) restructure the national economy in such a way that gives a severely disproportionate weight to finance above all other sectors of the economy including manufacturing. The economy, in this way, becomes more about financial services, legal services, information services, and the like.

I could be wrong but I believe it was former vice president, Al Gore, who, in the nineties, said that the United States was evolving into or had become a "knowledge-based" society. Remember that, please, for later.

If a country is going to be increasingly more about making money by moving it around, than making things, well, we have to get those things we aren't making anymore from someplace else, other countries.... Globalization.

In his book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002), Kevin Phillips quoted a 1996 article in Foreign Policy magazine called "Securities: The New Wealth Machine," explaining that securitization is the issuance of high quality stocks and bonds, generally, which had become the most powerful wealth creation engine in the world. According to the article, while societies used to acquire wealth slowly, they can now do so quickly and directly, but we must keep in mind that "the new approach requires that a state find ways to increase the market value of its productive assets." And, according to Phillips, the article made itself more explicit by saying -again, talking about state policy - that "an economic policy that aims to achieve growth by wealth creation therefore does not attempt to increase the production of goods and services, except as a secondary objective (p.104)."

In other words, when you liberalize finance, you tend to correspondingly restrict trade - and still you have globalization (notice, I say that last part without irony; no quotation marks around the term 'globalization').

Chapter four of Wealth and Democracy, is called "The World is Our Oyster: The Transformation of Leading World Economic Powers." In that chapter Phillips talks about the financialization of the economy and what that has meant in terms of social stability, income inequality between rich and poor, deterioration of public health, squalor, mass pauperization of the working class, and so forth.

I'll continue this next time.

wingedcentaur