Coherent thoughts and lucid words elude me at the moment, but the effect of this article is more jarring than any other seemingly innocuous piece of journalism I've read in a long while. At one and the same time this piece conveys that 1) "globalism," that peculiar admixture of world-spanning neo-liberalism and overripe US financial-military imperialism, looks far, far different than any acute observer could have prognosticated in the late 1990's and 2) the confluence of political trends that respond to/exploit the contradictions of "globalism" are far, far more regressive than any hopeful radical internationalist might have envisioned in the late 1990's.
In the metropolitan centers, you've got decadent concentrations of hedge fund and private equity wealth; in select "authoritarian capitalist" semi-peripheries, you've got cliques of propertied power taking advantage of primary commodity or transnational assembly line booms to buy into and sustain inequality-enhancing asset bubbles for sale on Wall Street or the City of London. In the former, socio-political conditions for nativist-populist reactions are being sown deeper every day; in the latter, regimes that style themselves as national developmentalist but in fact are mostly about private accumulation gather strength every day. And the two tendencies strengthen one another.
Fuck, it's really beyond time to pack it all in and start self-administering a hefty suite of depressants and anti-depressants.
MG posted:
>Governments Get
>Bolder in Buying
>Equity Stakes
John Gulick Akita, Japan
"So I studied the inmates to see/So I asked myself who's got the power, the whites, the blacks, or just the gun tower" Ice T
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