"If Americans wish to repair their own decayed democracy,
they must also make themselves into large-minded citizens of the
world. To protect their own economic interests, they will have
to develop an interest in the economic conditions of people elsewhere.
... American democracy is now imprisoned by new circumstances-the
dynamics of the global economy-and this has produced a daunting
paradox: Restoring the domestic political order will require a
new version of internationalism.
As a political system, the global economy is running downhill-a
system that searches the world for the lowest common denominator
in terms of national standards for wages, taxes and corporate
obligations to health, the environment and stable communities.
Left unchallenged, the global system will continue to undermine
America's widely shared prosperity, but it also subverts the nation's
ability to set its own political standards, the laws that uphold
the shared values of society. This reality constitutes the largest
challenge confronting American democracy, one that underlies every
other aspect of the democratic problem. The global economy has
the practical power to check almost every effort Americans may
undertake to reform their own political system-unless people learn
how to confront the global system too. Elite political opinion
holds that such resistance is undesirable and, in any case, impossible.
For ordinary Americans, traditionally independent and insular,
the challenge requires them to think anew their place in the world.
The only plausible way that citizens can defend themselves and
their nation against the forces of globalization is to link their
own interests cooperatively with the interests of other peoples
in other nations-that is, with the foreigners who are competitors
for the jobs and production but who are also victimized by the
system. Americans will have to create new democratic alliances
across national borders with the less prosperous people caught
in the same dilemma. Together, they have to impose new political
standards on multinational enterprises and on their own governments."
From William Greider, Who Will Tell the People (New York: Touchstone.
1992) pp. 377-378.
exerpted from the book
CORPORATIONS ARE GOING TO GET YOUR MAMA
edited by Kevin Danaher
Common Courage Press
Box 702
Monroe, Maine 04951
phone - 207-525-0900
fax - 207-525-3068
Reforming
the System
Corporations
Gonna Get Mama