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Rebecca Brayton: In part one of our interview with John Ralston Saul, he told us about the reasons behind the collapse of globalism. Hi! I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com. And today, in part two of our interview, this world renowned political philosopher tells us if there is in fact a solution to a global financial crisis.
John Ralston Saul: When you are in a difficult situation, the right thing to do is to step back and try to understand the context. What is the shape of the problem? If you could get a handle on the real shape of the problem, you can do something about it. If you don’t step back, and say, “Okay, how does trade actually work?” Are there other ways of thinking about trade as opposed to free trade versus protections and maybe there are other options here. Maybe we have to think about production in different way. Maybe actually maximizing production is not really a terribly useful thing in the current world system where we can create surpluses in three seconds. You know, the Chinese create a surplus production for anything you want, so what does maximizing production mean? You have to rethink all the stuff. Of course people are terrified to rethink things in the middle of a crisis but if you can’t do it in a crisis, when are you going to do it?
People who are calling for a regulated international money market or financial markets are right. We need to this and we need to do this really fast. Before this, we were headed for probably regionalism. There are already all the signs of the returns of rather old fashioned protection as was said.
Now, either this crisis will actually accentuate the regionalism or it might actually lead to something different which there is the possibility of a new kind of internationalism. People who talk about globalism, they keep redefining themselves by the second. Globalism is a certain idea of deregulated international marketplaces. Once you move away from that, it’s no longer globalism. It’s another form of internationalism or regionalism or nationalism or whatever and we might if we were really lucky get a kind of interesting new form of internationalism because of the crisis.
The moment here were people say what do you do in a crisis? Well, some of the stuff you do is really do is really old fashioned. You got to keep your economy going but that means you have to shove the money to the places where people do things. You don’t shove at the top and it is absolutely fascinating that people who for 30 years have said they represented individualism and competition now say the best thing to do is to shove billions of dollars in the absolute top and hope it trickles down. In other words, what they’re making is sort of 18th century aristocratic argument. If we give money to the dukes, the dukes will ensure that the peasants receive a percentage of it. This is so out of it. It’s so un-modern. It’s worth making fun of that to actually to allow us to say, “Wait a minute, why are we putting billions of dollars at the top? This makes no sense at all.”
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