Kuttner 5/31 – [Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School; “After Hyper-Globalization”; 5/31/2022; https://www.proquest.com/docview/2671558849?parentSessionId=tQewAIYQgwaRU%2BkgQTVVwTbT%2FEPHUHQLjgS5V4PyU8A%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=14667; DOA: 6/17/22; Lowell-JL]
By hyper-globalization, I mean the premise that cross-border trade and capital movements should be free from regulatory restraints and national industrial policies. This became the new definition of “free trade” and the object of intense U.S. diplomacy beginning in the 1980s. After 1990, this vision was codified in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in dozens of bilateral deals. Promoters of the shift invoked economic theory, but in practice it was driven by the corporate push to use trade rules aggressively to undermine national regulation of capitalism, from banking (rebranded as “trade in financial services”) to industry-created pollution. NAFTA allowed corporations to sue in special courts to challenge health, safety, and environmental regulations as incursions on their trading rights. Within the EU, long-standing guarantees of collective bargaining were overturned as impinging on the cross-border rights of capital. WTO rules became obstacles to distributing free or cheap vaccines in a worldwide pandemic. Hyper-globalization was the global face of neoliberalism, as well as its enforcer.
From the start, the system was a bundle of contradictions. Western leaders who sponsored this shift knew from their national experience that unregulated markets are far from efficient. For almost a century, nations dealt with the anomalies of markets by regulating finance, labor, health, and the environment. They used industrial and research subsidies and public ownership to help their economies develop. Wherever nations failed to regulate, capitalism created gross inequality and environmental disasters, as well as periodic financial bubbles, systemic crashes, and prolonged depressions. But through some mysterious alchemy, when commerce crossed borders, unregulated markets were supposedly efficient after all. Free-traders never explained the inconsistency.
