Confronting Davos: The Class Politics of Global Governancejfaux's picture
By Jeff Faux | bio
I’ll start with the anecdote that inspired my book, The Global Class War. During the 1993 fight over Congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a corporate lobbyist, exasperated with my opposition to NAFTA, collared me in a corridor of the Capitol. “Don’t you understand?” she sputtered. “We have to help Salinas
. He’s been to Harvard. He’s one of us.”
True, I once had a fellowship to the Kennedy Institute of Politics, but I hardly considered myself a “Harvard Man”. She hadn’t gone there at all. But despite the considerable social distance between the president of Mexico and both of us, she was appealing to a sense of class solidarity among educated elites and global movers and shakers who have more in common with each other than with ordinary people who just happen to share their nationality.
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All markets generate class politics –conflict among groups over, as Harold Lasswell once famously put it, “Who Gets What.” So it’s no surprise that a cross-border class politics has developed in the wake of the globalizing economy. At this point it is pretty much a one-party system. Call it the Party of Davos, after the annual elite bash in the Swiss Alps that resembles the big-donor receptions at a political convention –corporate CEOs and world class investors, the people who carry their bags, and the politicians, pundits and policy intellectuals who carry their water.
The political role of Davos is obscured by the confused language of the public debate. Citizens are told that the global economy has obliterated borders. At the same time, economic competition is mostly described as a Westphalian rivalry of nation-state against nation-state. Thus, it’s “China” versus the “US.” But the economic challenge to Americans is not from China, per se, but from a business partnership between Chinese commissars who provide the cheap labor and American and other transnationals who provide the technology and financing – and whose lobbyists in Washington provided access to the US market.
Among politicians and pundits, the US economic “national interest” is constantly equated with the profitability of “our” companies. But as the people who own and manage “American” corporations increasingly find their workers, production sites, partners and customers in various parts of the globe, they are systematically disconnecting their future from the fate of Americans who work and invest in America. The process is far from complete, but its direction is clear. The chairman of Ford noted over a decade ago that his firm “isn’t even an American Company…Our managers are multinational. We teach them to think and act globally.” The CEO of Cisco Systems – poster company for the information economy – announced last year that “What we are trying to do is outline an entire strategy for becoming a Chinese company.”
after you read the snip I gave...go to the "Comments Section." Enlightened posts.....
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/feb/26/confronting_davos_the_class_politics_of_global_governance
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