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This review could only be named after the title of the book. There's no
point in trying to steal the thunder when Paul Hellyer is dispensing so
much of his own in his systematic portrayal of globalisation as the
biggest con-job in history.
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You might assume he's some crank, some bit of class of '68 flotsam who's
washed up into the world of '90s conspiracy vending. Well think again.
Paul Hellyer is the former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. When I found
this out I was salivating to read Stop
Think. It's not that academic takes on globalisation are a waste of
time, it's just that they don't come out of the experience of
realpolitik. This is a guy who signed major 'liberalising'
treaties, and has lived to regret it.
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So, for people who think that globalisation is all about happy smiling
people joining hands and getting connected -- i.e. those who have seen too
many Coke, Oneworld or Ericsson ads -- Hellyer's belief that globalisation amounts to
big concerns like trans-national corporations (TNCs) and banks bullying smaller
concerns like nations and people into servitude comes in the rhetorical form of
a wake-up call. He believes that the world is run by a non-elected
financial élite: the real government behind what he calls
'provisional' governments. The organisations which make up the real
government have huge coercive power, and the threat of their not
investing in given countries is enough to ensure that they steer the macroeconomic
policies of compliant provisional governments. The bunches of puppets
called politicians are elected by people who have no idea that democracy
is little more than the name of a distracting soap opera, at least when it
comes to the big issues of economics.
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From a position of left-wing social democracy and economic
interventionism, Hellyer starts off by discounting the monetarist
revolution as a failure of massive proportions. For him, deregulation
fever, specifically the delegation of control of the money supply (both actual
money creation and fiscal policy) to central banks (who are just
consortiums of private bankers), is driven by both stupidity and greed.
Banks (backed up by the coercive power of international organisations
comprising unelected bureaucrats) undemocratically and immorally
control macroeconomics in the world today. They can create as much credit money as
they want in order to try to get profits back in the form of interest, so
they lend money that doesn't really exist to projects run by their TNC
pals, projects that have dubious benefits for the 'real' economy and less
well-off people. And when the inevitable credit-bubbles burst, as happened
recently in South-East Asia, the loss gets socialised. People lose their
livelihoods and assets, and the international financial sector gets bailed
out by IMF loans that politicians claim are going to help a
stricken nation. And why this bail out of the cause? So that
the global financial élite can move on to plunder another market in the dabble-and-dash style
made possible by a 'liberalised' world trade and investment environment,
the one they have arm-twisted and threatened governments around the world
into ratifying.
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And although Hellyer has the generosity to commend the good intentions of
a few players, the occasional visionary World Bank chief, for example, he is
in no doubt that the whole aim of 'development' as we know it, is an
inhumane reaping of profits. He gives several enraging examples of how
loans that delivered no benefits to the masses were given to developing
countries for the sole purpose of providing the infrastructure that
TNCs required to move in in order to take out. The
fact that even the interest burdens of such unrepayable loans prevent many governments from
providing basic services to their people is bad enough. What is perverse
is that such loans come with strings attached, or perhaps, in more
accurate words just one big rope on which is written 'open your market
without qualification'. This forced liberalisation, Hellyer avers, is passed off as the making of a
level playing field for international 'free trade', when in fact it
amounts to forbidding governments to use their sovereign power to block
corporate interests in favour of citizen needs. He makes the
devastatingly obvious point that trade without rules simply means colonialism on a scale
never before witnessed. It allows the already-big capital
concentrations of the world -- principally the ones built up under the
protectionist period of 'old' colonialism -- to subject everything and
everyone else to their massive buying and selling power.
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Throughout the book Hellyer makes technical arguments about the money
supply, referencing a range of economic theorists from
Friedman to Keynes. But his ultimately populist message revolves around
the unsustainability-for-all-to-see of the world's debt burden. The
solution must lie in the removal of this debt and the economic conventions that
have given rise to it. This he believes can be achieved by
the reassertion of governments' rights to control both the money
supply and conditions of trading. His contingency plan, should the real
government and its puppets desist, is a suggested
non-repayment of debt by developing countries. And if the
financial élite really hold on to their greed, and cannot be
shaken by the actions of any governments at all, then World
War 3, as he puts it, will be between the banks and the people.
Information would be the major resource in such a war, and Hellyer is
already somewhat alarmed by the (mis)informing of the public about
economic issues that is propagated by the Press and
through the public relations drives of a range of very rich pro-liberalisation
organisations from private businesses to the World Bank. He believes that neo-classical
economics is a religious creed that irrationally dominates the imagination of our time, drowning
out alternative economic theories in the media so that debate revolves around
terms and problematics set out by this agenda alone. Interestingly he believes the
Internet, in its present form with sites like his own MAI-Not and the ejournal Multinational
Monitor, could be a vital tool in providing the kind of information
flows needed to get enough people to make a difference to be aware
of the moves of the 'real' government.
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All in all, this book will be of interest to people already on the
anti-globalisation train, people who have read books like David Korten's
When
Corporations Rule the World. Given that it is written by a
long-standing senior politician, it is also likely to spark the
interest of people who have not before thought critically about the
globalisation bandwagon. And although by now you've probably guessed my
own enthusiasm for this book, there are one or two problems with it. For a
start it makes no mention of the permanent war economies of the USA and Western Europe, the ways
that their massive arms industries make their invisible contributions to
world economic and political forces. But I accept this, reluctantly, as
falling outside of Hellyer's brief. What Stop
Think achieves in compensation is a wonderful corrective for a lot of
academic work in the fields of colonialism studies and globalisation. It
should be compulsory reading for those post-colonial critics who give
endlessly subtle accounts of the 'cultures' of colonialism without
acknowledging the agental force of money, the mob that Terry Eagleton is
so apt to criticise.
It also nicely qualifies the almost endlessly open-minded
musings that are given by those academics who pass over a serious search
for the 'nuts and bolts' conditions of possibility of globalisation because they
are enthralled by the romance of the very concept. Included here
must be Anthony Giddens, Director of the London School of Economics, in his recent
BBC/ABC Reith
Lectures. I'd agree with him that globalisation
marks a certain stage in the development of communication technology and
involves the non-localising proliferation of identities! But what are the agental
forces that subtend this? Answer: trans-national, often bandit-like
movements of capital which sponsor other forms of mobility, including that
of the images which are distributed by media TNCs who do their damnedest
to make globalisation seem like the techno-utopian end of all
historico-political becoming in a moment of liberating circularity. As
long as these images abound and drown out alternatives, getting a
worthwhile popular debate about globalisation going will be a challenge.
I'm glad Paul Hellyer has risen to it so eloquently.
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Details
Paul Hellyer. Stop Think. Toronto: Chimo Media, 1999.
(In Australia copies are obtainable from the Australian Coalition of
Economic Justice, email: morrij@bigpond.com).
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Guy Redden. "Stop: Think: 'Stop Think'." M/C Reviews 23 July 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/stop.html>.
Chicago style:
Guy Redden, "Stop: Think: 'Stop Think'," M/C Reviews 23 July 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/stop.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Guy Redden. (1999) Stop: think: 'Stop Think'. M/C Reviews 23 July 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/stop.html> ([your date of access]).
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