Economic globalization means making money everywhere
from everything off of everyone. Anything goes. Global
commerce never stops. As Wall Street opens in New York,
workers in Sydney close a busy day by watching paint dry
while French investors eagerly gather round a mechanic
changing a flat tire.

Now Im riding on a train to downtown Tokyo still thinking
about the human significance of the global economic order.
Naturally I cant help wishing for the inevitable bone ugly
bankruptcy followed by the total collapse of this highly
complex system not that Im a Marxist or a Nazi or part
of some arcane religious cult.

But before that happens we have to carefully consider the
constituents, world markets and transnational corporations,
international economic institutions like the IMF, the WTO
and Burger King, borderless and containerized shipping and
branding, the regional trading systems, monetized debt,
downsizing and transferring good jobs to lousy Third World
hell-holes then shipping back tons of useless crap to LA and
London where teenagers line up to buy ripped jeans and bags
of stupid hiphop junk.

Countries used to have their own national economies at least
I think they did, which lasted until the 1980s when Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sat down to a working breakfast
of hot buttered scones and soft boiled eggs, now members of
Zimbabwes burgeoning middle class drive around with the
top down while American workers are getting fired left and
right like the former Communist China where leaders arrange
Tupperware parties and drive tanks over unarmed student
demonstrators.

What really gets my goat is when some corporate flack
comes on CNBC Business News and starts blaming
government for economic instability or low growth or high
unemployment huge deficits phony balance sheets tainted
meat failing schools or unintended acceleration when all
along its been some crooked corporate dickwads, the so-
called invisible hand.

God knows politicians are bad enough and Neoliberalism
is rooted in the classical liberal, not conservatives who were
Tories, ideals of Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer who said
the fittest would naturally rise to the top like Texas where
the Mexican drug cartels preach the natural efficiency of
free market competition and also advocate the elimination
of barriers to imports.

I cant help wondering if semiotics is a real science or if our
Hopes For The Future are permanently dashed by the new
global economy which doesnt care about people, I know thats
a terribly leftist cliché but what else can you say, just like
when someones hairs not working or someones singing didnt
do it for Simon so he says youre off the show, which is not just
another form of Americanization imposed on the rest of the
world which is itself experiencing awful stresses because of
economic globalization.

www.tokyopoet.com
Tokyo, Tuesday, 03/16/10