Quotes from the book

One World Ready or Not

by William Greider

Touchstone Press, 1997

In the primitive legal climate of the poorer nations, industry has found it can revive the worst forms of nineteenth century exploitation, abuses outlawed long ago in the advanced economies, including extreme physical dangers to workers and the use of children as expendable cheap labor.

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What was the Cold War really all about? Was it about securing freedom for enslaved peoples, as every patriot believed, or was it about securing free markets for capitalism, as Marxist critics often argued? The goal of human rights that leading governments once described as universal has been diluted by a new form of commercial relativism.

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A corporation that has made stratigic investments based on the cost advantages offered by repressive societies can hardly be expected in advocate their abolition.

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What is a nation, after all, if commerce has destroyed the meaning of national boundries? For that matter, what is a citizen? Are people confined by accident of birth to certain geographical locations or are they as free as business and finance? What is the future of work and workers when machines make things and also do much of the thinking? What is the meaning of wealth and economic growth if the world is someday choking on its own luxuriously wasteful consumption?

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Today, there is the ... widespread conviction that the marketplace can sort out large public problems for us far better than any mere mortals could. This faith has attained almost relligious certitude, at least among some governing elites, but ... it is the ideology that led the early twentieth cnetury into the massive suffering of global depression and the rise of violent fascism.

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Multinational corporations, faced with continuing surpluses, desperately need entry into the burgeoning markets [of the world].

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The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.

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As capital owners and financial markets acclumulate greater girth and a dominating influence, their search for higher returns becomes increasingly purified in purpose - detached from social concerns and abstracted from the practical realities of commerce. In this atmosphere, investors develop rising expectations of what their invested savings ought to earn and the risiing prices in financial markets gradually diverge from the underlying economic reality. Since returns on capital are risng faster than the productive output that must pay them, the process imposes greater and greater burdens on commerce and societies - debt obligations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by the future and, sooner or later, must be liquidated, written off or forgiven.

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A market crash ... is the abrupt deflation of prices and of misplaced hopes.

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The rich nations of the world are acting like ancient usurers, lending money to the desperate poor on terms that cannot possibly be met and, thus, steadily acquiring more and more control over the lives and assets of the poor.

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The social question - how does a society sustain equable relations among its own people - has been brushed aside by the economic sphere. Social cohesion and consent, even the minimal standards of human decency, are irrelevent to free markets. p334

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The process of industrialization has never been pretty in its primitive stages. Americans or Europeans who draw back in horror at the present brutalities in Asia or Latin America should understand that they are glimpsing repetitions of what happened in their own national histories. Practices that were forbidden as inhumane in their own countries only after long political struggle.

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If multinational enterprises truly expect greater human freedom and social equity to emerge from the marketplace, then why do they expend so much political energy to prevent these conditions from developing?

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Are basic rights of human existence confined to those civilized societies wealthy enough to afford them? Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others. p336

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When law and social values retreat.. before the power of markets, then capitalism's natural drive to maximum returns ha[s] no internal governor to check its social behavior. p341

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It took Britain's aristocracy and gentry a century and a half before they yielded full political rights to everyone; in the meantime, the society was defined by a rigidified class structure and recurring, sometimes violent conflicts between labor and property.

England's failure to address the social consequences of industrial revolution in a timely manner proved fateful for the society it became. The indifference of the ruling class led directly to the subsequent generations of dispiriting ideological struggles, labor versus capital, and produced a cramped social order that two hundred years later is still riven by class conflict and harsh inequalities. Every nation, it seemed, chose its own heaven and hell. p352

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Americans cannot claim a higher morality while benefiting from inhumnae exploitation. p356

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In its present terms, the global system values property over human life. p359

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A society unwilling to confront its social reality in a timely manner is doomed to experience the consequences in later generations and possibly forever. p 383

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A democratic society makes choices and those choices will reflect what its people truly value. p467

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The nation-state is not going to disappear anytime soon for the good reason that citizens need some way to assert control over multinational corporations and capital. p471

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