Lost opportunities

Anyway, what did happen was that in the 1950s and 1960s the American corporate system began to spread around the world, catching on (albeit with some variation in places like Japan and Germany) and becoming dominant by the 1980s. At this time, with the advent of genuinely capable microelectronic systems, what were global-scale financial systems took over. With corporate control of finance and trade flows, even the biggest governments fell into line and pursued policies that maximised their profits. It was all coming unstuck by the turn of the century, but some fancy accounting and the rise of China kept things ticking over. Certain critical structural matters, like guaranteeing a reliable energy supply, were never properly addressed.

These days, with probably the most incompetent American leadership ever, a transnational corporate sector that does what it likes, a financial system constantly teetering on collapse, popular culture that recycles the same mindless pap, it is hard to imagine a civilisation able to solve any real problems. Imagine for instance a world leader announcing a huge project to go into space, as Kennedy did in 1961, let alone issuing a call to go on fighting a long world war, as Churchill did. We cannot even do the relatively simple things required to stop ourselves from frying the planet.

The changes we require with some urgency today are in some ways the same as they were after World War Two. We need governments to step up as the true representatives of the people to assert dominance over the private sector and to put in place a number of emergency programs to head off global disaster. If they did this, the private sector would read the writing on the wall and get on board, as it did in wartime.

Certainly governments should consult more than they tended to do in the 1940s and 1950s. It took the Ban the Bomb movement to get people into the streets in the 1950s, and they kept going back to express their views on a variety of topics. Governments were put on notice that their power was not absolute, and they instigated a number of social reforms to placate the public. They could re-establish their credentials by rebuilding trust in initiatives related to the essential issues of education and health, both of which are in slow collapse in the West, and globally by supporting genuinely fair open trade and economic development programs.

Perhaps most importantly we need a global organisation where sustained debate can occur and national leaders be made to answer to each other. This was supposed to be what the UN, and before that the League of Nations, was for. We could revitalise the UN, or create some new body (the voting system in the UN is unfair to large population countries like India, China and Indonesia). We also need a mass media that actually finds and reports real news, essential if we are revitalise democracy.

None of this is on the cards right now, but perhaps as things continue to fall apart…