it took me a long time to figure out what clinton meant by "globalization"

[click image, video, hour and a half]

I was very taken up with the multifarious demands of life with Agent 86. While I am sure I had a better grasp of what was going on in the world than most, because of the sick and sickening system, I was not able to grasp exactly what was going on. And as 86 got worse, my tenuous grasp got looser. By the time a deadbeat fisherman I knew, who'd never turned a profit in his entire experience got a mortgage on some property, to the tune of 200,000, I was at the point of answering my astonishment with the notion that land on the California coast was just so hot that the bank didn't care if he defaulted; they could turn around and get all their money right back at any time. I had no way of knowing what was really at the heart of that action.

"Globalization" means corporations can operate anywhere -- anywhere they figure they can optimize profits by lower labor costs and little or no taxation -- and financial instruments are spread across the globe. This just never was clear. Clinton made it sound so damn humanitarian, but, after the constant distraction of my madman was obviated, I began to be able to think about this stuff a little more carefully. Globalization is supremely humanitarian for those who have a lot of money, and are nasty enough to successfully even rip off each other. It is death to workers, wage-earners, across the globe. So I started screaming about it on radio talk shows, to everyone in comments online, and to everyone I meet in my day to day life.

The natural consequence of globalization is great estates with private armies to keep out the starving and naked hordes, here in the United States and across the planet.

Period.

I have screamed that globalization could be great stuff, if FIRST we put in the proper protections for workers everywhere, ways that local populations don't starve when their factories move to Uzbekistan, and where the Uzbeks don't starve while working their butts off at our old jobs. Do we want a world where you need to get to Azerbaijan to get the job you are qualified for and that pays enough to feed your family?

Wake up.

COURAGE, the courage shown by the Argentines in this video, is not just something you get to cheer at the movies. You love Braveheart and Maximus because they are representations of what you love and admire, but are too distracted, witless with stress, and just plain too chicken manifest yourself.