The Alexandrian model of globalisation

There’s another insidious effect from the business homogenisation of the world. The victims of corporations spill over the border of many countries, including the border of America. They are running away from the destruction of their culture and societies. They are the refugees of globalisation. But now entire countries are joining the ranks of these refugees.

The financial meltdown of Greece and Ireland, for example, was not accidental or solely the result of Greek and Irish kleptocrats. Greece and Ireland were no different than Americans tempted and urged to borrow beyond their means. In the case of the deceived American borrowers, they lose their homes: but Greece and Ireland lose their independence and slide violently into poverty and humiliation. The role of the bank appropriating the house of the deliquent borrower is taken over by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the American financial policeman of corporate capitalism.

The IMF, expert in institutionalising poverty among nations, insists on austere economic policies that impoverish the majority of the population, thus assuming the leadership of the country in a manner taken from the textbook of colonialism. The money Greece and Ireland received from the European Union and IMF went to pay the private lenders, transferring the Greek and Irish debt to government institutions.

In contrast to the Alexandrian globalisation that spread the benefits of Greek culture to the world two millennia ago, the globalisation of our time impoverishes the many for the luxury of the few. It is a mafia-like affair among the chiefs of corporations backed by government, religious, and academic elites.

What we need is a globalisation modeled from the eras of Alexander the Great and medieval Islam where things of the mind mattered more than petroleum and bombs.

We need to globalise the best things of our Western culture that have their roots in Greece: democracy, books, libraries, science and technology, universities and love for the natural world.

Put people to work to clean up the mess of unregulated capitalism. Reforest the logged forests; free the rivers from dams; stop factory fishing; replace industrialised farming and its pesticide infrastructure with small family farmers; expand public transportation everywhere; end toxic industries and nuclear power plants, replacing them with solar and wind power; dismantle all nuclear bombs in the world, prohibiting their manufacture and possession.

Tax the very rich for this work of reconstruction. Cut down military spending and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remind the Muslim Arabs to return to the Hellenic-inspired periods of their history and restart their houses of wisdom.

Now that would be a globalisation that would change today’s fear to campaigns for saving our civilisation - and the earth. Aristotle was right: the Earth is alive. Our fate is inextricably tied to the wellbeing of our Mother Earth.