Bcc: (private correspondent)
Someone wrote to me:
>The way i see out of the situation is to move power closer to people,
>eliminating most of federal bureaucracy entirely. The transnationals
>would face quite a challenge dealing with miriads of local governments
>instead of bribing few Washington "insiders".
>...The big question is how to prevent global monopolism, i.e. situations
>when huge transnational companies capture the entire market. I do not
>think any global ruling bodies are necessary to combat the threat; rather,
>local governments may impose import fees depending on the global market
>share of the supplier.
Please observe the current power relationship between
transnationals and the various countries of the world. The TN's _thrive_
on lots of little countries, each strapped for cash, looking to global
trade to pull them out of debt. The TN's play them off against one
another. The TN's are consequently controlling not only global trade and
finance, but increasingly the internal affairs of each country. They no
longer need or want power concentrated in DC, Berlin, or London.
Your vision of robust autonomous local governments, each able to
thumb its nose at EXON via arbitrary tariffs, is utopian. If you're
talking about bio-region autonomy, sustainable development, and healthy,
functioning, democratic processes, then it is a utopian vision I happen to
share.
But utopias are long-term-goal scenarios -- typically not workable
as immediate political objectives. That's what the hippies found out when
they migrated to Oregon in the sixties to form self-sufficient communities.
Rather than serving as the seeds of a new social/economic paradigm, they
became irrelevant drop-outs and gradually dissolved away due to economic
unviability and organizational inexperience.
To _actually_ move toward your utopia, you need to understand what
forces in the world prevent the viability of your vision, and work on those
forces first. The power dynamics have to be changed appropriately, and
when the conditions are right, the utopia can be proposed as an objective.
Just like when you plant a garden, you first clear and dig-up the area --
only then do you begin planting.
In our world today, the power-dynamics is primarily a matter of
giant corporations running things, with national government being the only
entities of a sufficient scale to even enter into the power dialog. The
cutting-edge changes being implemented currently by the corporate
power-structure _is_ the dismantlement of government -- but it is not in
the direction of your utopia, it is in the direction of weakened, shrunken,
and indebted national entities, which internally exhibit increasingly
fascist regimes. The TN's don't want to have to dialog with _anyone_ about
their plans, they want to be in total control.
Under these current conditions of power and change, your support
for devolution serves only to accelerate the trend toward fascism /
corporate-feudalism, and makes the realization of your utopia impossible.
You libertarians are being duped big time. You're eager to drink
your kool-aid, and you're helping to burn down the compound around all of
us.
Until you wake up from your trance, you remain part of the problem,
not the solution. May this flame disturb your slumber.
Regards,
Richard
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Posted by Richard K. Moore - •••@••.••• - Wexford, Ireland
(WWW or FTP) --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore/cyberlib
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