It's Monbiot Again. This Time He's On About Salvaging Democracy or Something Like That.

No matter how much Justin thinks it's great, neoliberal globalism is a failed experiment. It causes a lot more harm than good. Even the WTO and the IMF now acknowledge that globalism undermines and stagnates national economies and propels inequality to dangerous heights.

John Ralston Saul contends we're in a period of "interregnum." That's a term meaning an interval between one regime and its successor. JRS argues that we're wallowing in the globalism rut while our leaders try to find the vision to replace it. So far, by his count, that's been going on for more than a decade.

The idea of tearing up the free trade economic model is one thing. The bigger problem is what model you invoke next. In my view the safe bet is to go back to something resembling the economic model in use prior to the era of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney only substantially revised to reflect the environmental realities that confront us today. Economic developments of a seismic magnitude from automation to advanced robotics could be socially devastating to any nation that has ceded too much authority to the commercial sector to harness these developments to the public good.  We urgently need a return of the true nation state with full national sovereignty, the sort of muscular sovereignty essential to help heal our divisions, restore confidence in our government and institutions and meet the challenges of this century.

George Monbiot has some interesting ideas along the same lines. He thinks that saving democracy starts with breaking the chokehold of transnational corporatism. He takes a look at a world in which liberal democracy is in retreat and posits the villain - McDonalds.


From all this I draw the following, peculiar conclusion: no country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy.

...In using McDonald’s as shorthand for the forces tearing democracy apart, I am ...writing figuratively. I do not mean that the presence of the burger chain itself is the cause of the decline of open, democratic societies (though it has played its part in Britain, using our defamation laws against its critics). Nor do I mean that countries hosting McDonald’s will necessarily mutate into dictatorships.


What I mean is that, under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital that McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies. The old forms and forums still exist – parliaments and congresses remain standing – but the power they once contained seeps away, re-emerging where we can no longer reach it.

The political power that should belong to us has flitted into confidential meetings with the lobbyists and donors who establish the limits of debate and action. It has slipped into the diktats of the IMF and the European Central Bank, which respond not to the people but to the financial sector. It has been transported, under armed guard, into the icy fastness of Davos... 

Above all, the power that should belong to the people is being crushed by international treaty. Contracts such as Nafta, Ceta the proposed TransPacific Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement and the failed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are crafted behind closed doors in discussions dominated by corporate lobbyists. And those lobbyists are able to slip in clauses no informed electorate would ever approve of, such as the establishment of opaque offshore tribunals, through which corporations can bypass national courts, challenge national laws and demand compensation for the results of democratic decisions.

These treaties limit the scope of politics, prevent states changing social outcomes and drive down labour rights, consumer protection, financial regulation and the quality of neighbourhoods. They make a mockery of sovereignty. Anyone who forgets that striking them down was one of Donald Trump’s main promises will fail to understand why people were prepared to risk so much in electing him.

...In his book The Globalisation Paradox, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik describes a political trilemma. Democracy, national sovereignty and hyperglobalisation, he argues, are incompatible. You cannot have all three at once. McDonaldisation crowds out domestic politics. Incoherent and dangerous as it often is, the global backlash against mainstream politicians is at heart an attempt to reassert national sovereignty against the forces of undemocratic globalisation.

...a similar choice was articulated by the great US jurist Louis Brandeis. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” he said.

...In 1938 President Roosevelt warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” The Democrats saw concentrated corporate power as a form of dictatorship. They broke up giant banks and businesses and chained the chainstores. What Roosevelt, Brandeis and Patman knew has been forgotten by those in power, including powerful journalists. But not by the victims of this system.

And then there was the first President Roosevelt, Theodore, who in 1910 had this to add to today's debate.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. 

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

...Now, this means that our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. ...For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.
The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

Teddy Roosevelt's stirring words sound positively leftist but that appearance is merely a reflection of how far we have drifted to the radical right during the era of neoliberalism over these past three plus decades.

What legendary jurist Louis Brandeis said, what Franklin Roosevelt said, what Theodore Roosevelt said are really principles that are foundational to progressive, liberal democracy. Their words are a powerful denunciation of today's "predator state" in which so much of our sovereignty has been negligently ceded to our "mighty commercial forces" that pursue their corporate interests at the direct and substantial cost to our nation and our people.