“The force of Globalism,” Saul writes, “through trade agreements, deregulation and privatization, would seriously weaken the ability of nation-states to act with any political independence.”80
For most of American history, businesses—for-profit and nonprofit—had mission statements that were broader than simply serving the interests of the shareholders and CEOs, and referred instead to the long-term interest of the company, its workers, and its customers. And perhaps most important, the long-term interest of the nation it belonged to. After all, if your nation goes to hell, so does your market—a collapse isn’t good for business.
But globalism changed the game. Globalism is the breaking down of economic borders. What globalism does is peel away those government protections of national industries, and let global Economic Royalists dive in and feast on the goods. Once government is out of the way, Saul explains, the transnational corporations rise to power. “Richer than a majority of nation-states on the planet, free of the geographical and social obligations of these old states, beyond the embarrassing demands of nationalism, freed in fact from the emotional, immeasurable demands of the citizenry, the transnational would be able to organize world affairs in a more rational, efficient manner.”
Without the “demands of nationalism,” corporations can skate by without hiring American workers, they can dodge taxes, and they can spew toxic chemicals all over our commons. Instead of nationalism, corporations are bound by efficiency, which in turn yields higher profits. And it’s far more efficient and profitable to hire low-wage workers in India, to spend millions lobbying to avoid billions in taxes, and to skirt regulations that keep people working on oil rigs alive and prevent ecological disasters.
Clinton opened the door to globalism, but George W. Bush oversaw the looting of America by global psychopaths.
As a result of so-called free trade, every single month since 2001, our nation has shed, on average, fifty thousand manufacturing jobs. And in that same time period, over fifty thousand manufacturing plants—like the ones that used to line the rail tracks up and down the East Coast—have been permanently shut down.
At a blistering pace, American industries are being sold to the highest foreign bidders, be they Chinese business tycoons, Saudi princes, or Russian oligarchs. In the time it takes you to read just one page in this book, $240,000 worth of American industry is sold off to a foreign interest.81
In the past thirty years, foreign investors bought roughly $3 trillion worth of American industry.82 That means $3 trillion worth of assets that were generating profits for America, hiring American workers, and making things with a “Made in America” stamp on them are now in the possession of foreign nations, so if they continue to operate, all their profits go overseas. It’s like a giant liquidation sale in a nation that’s on the verge of going out of business.
To highlight just how in peril the United States’ economic dominance in the twenty-first century is, consider this trend: In the first decade of this new century, some of the biggest transnational corporations in America—corporations that employ one-fifth of all American workers—have been shipping jobs away en masse. Since 2000, these transnationals have laid off 2.9 million Americans, and hired 2.4 million foreign workers.83
Some of the most well known American companies, from all sectors, are contributing to this trend. Caterpillar, Cisco, Chevron, GE, Intel, Merck, Oracle, Stanley Works, and United Technologies have all outsourced at least 45 percent of their workforce to another country. GE has more than half of its workforce in other countries and yet GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was appointed to head President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide guidance on how to fix our economy.
And this outsourcing of our manufacturing base is creating enormous trade deficits.
For example, consider South Korea, where our automobile trade deficit alone is a whopping $10.8 billion. In 2009, South Korea exported $11.72 billion worth of cars into the US economy. We, on the other hand, were only allowed to export about $492 million worth of cars into theirs.84
Or India, where in 2010 we ran up a $10.3 billion trade deficit.85
Or China, where our 2010 trade deficit is a mind-boggling $273 billion—the largest trade deficit between two nations ever recorded in the history of the world.
Our trade relationship with China is particularly worrisome. While other nations are just banking off our dumb trade policies promoted by American CEOs who’ve sold their allegiance to Davos-promoted globalism instead of the United States, China is preparing to be the next world superpower.
Loose lips sink ships, but corporations that have developed some of America’s most advanced technologies are more than willing to sell off that technology to the Chinese government if they can just have a little taste of Chinese consumerism.
Leading IT manufacturers and defense industries are blatantly helping to grow the technological capacity of China in return for deeper market penetration and higher profits. In 2020, China will roll out its first full-size commercial airliner built thanks to technology largely developed by Boeing and Airbus.86
Of course, American transnational corporations have historically cavorted with nations whose interests were similarly opposed to those of the United States—morally at least. American CEOs made deals with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran—as was the case with foreign subsidiaries of Koch Industries, America’s second-largest private corporation. Other corporate interests worked with Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. They signed contracts with dictators like Mu‘ammar Gadhafi in Libya (even while our military was bombing Gadhafi).
Trade expert and former Commerce Department official in the Clinton White House Patrick Mulloy wrote in a 2006 report by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “The interests of the U.S.-based multinational corporations, which have done so much to influence our current policies toward China, are often not aligned with the broader interest of our nation.”
Again, with nationalism off the table, it’s only about profits at whatever cost. Mulloy concludes, “Focused on ‘shareholder value’… [corporations] are not charged to consider the larger impact of their decisions on the American economy and workers, and the impetus they give to China’s growing international, political, and military strength.”87
Eamonn Fingleton, an economist, best-selling author, and former editor at Forbes, who predicted both the Japanese stock market crash in 1987 as well as the tech-bubble crash in 2000, described this wild American sell-off by saying, “For just a few years of profits, America is giving away a technological inheritance that took generations to accumulate… the big gainers are… just a few thousand top corporate executives,” the guys hanging out at Davos, “who reap huge returns via bonuses and stock options.”88
Thanks to them, our nation’s current account deficit, primarily our trade imbalance, in 2006 was 7 percent of GDP. That’s the highest peacetime current account deficit ever recorded—second only to Italy in 1924, a year before Benito Mussolini anointed himself dictator of fascist Italy.89
There’s a lot of money to be made seeking out cheaper and cheaper labor markets. So wealth was growing exponentially, which made both political parties buy into this new global paradigm.
Columnist Chrystia Freeland nailed this mind-set perfectly in her 2011 article “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” which ran in The Atlantic magazine. She reported that one influential American hedge fund manager argued that it didn’t matter if the US economy was in peril, because “if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.”90