"Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart.”
Excerpted below is a recent book review of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, by Quinn Slobodian, Harvard University Press.
I have included a link to the entire article which I recommend reading if you wish to know more about how the rise of globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism may go hand in hand within a reasoned construct.
I could have included much more and still not done justice to the themes and thoughts that it contains.
I found it particularly helpful because it provides a plausible rationale for the continuation of the European Union, despite its malformed integration of a currency union without internal financial integration of debts and transfer payments. Not to mention its odd admixture of a remote central bureaucracy trumping traditional policy areas within the domain of national sovereignty.
It also helps to understand the stubborn commitment to global 'trade treaties' by corporate Democrats that tend to elevate international bureaucracies and rules bodies, dominated by corporate lobbyists, over the inclinations of their own national electorates.
Obama's determined slogging for the TPP, even as his intended Democratic successor was being electorally eviscerated for her perceived corporatist elitism, was otherwise inexplicable given his sophistication in managing perceptions.
In this perspective these seemingly obtuse things can be seen as 'features' rather than well-intentioned but naively crafted arrangements containing unintentional flaws.
This review also positions neoliberalism within the context of the development of economic and political thought in the 20th century. The two are inexorably entwined because, as is well established throughout human history, money is power.
"Globalism in this story is not only, or even primarily, an extension of contacts between people, trade, production. Rather, it is the creation of a set of property rights that, precisely because they span multiple sovereignties, cannot be touched by one government without inviting conflict with another. In this sense it is positively desirable for property claims to cross national borders. Foreign investment, regardless of its value or otherwise for financing production, performs a political function that domestic investment cannot...
"HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY MANKIND, A MAN OF SUFFERING, AND FAMILIAR WITH PAIN. LIKE ONE FROM WHOM PEOPLE HIDE THEIR FACES HE WAS DESPISED, AND WE HELD HIM IN LOW ESTEEM. SURELY HE TOOK UP OUR PAIN AND BORE OUR SUFFERING, YET WE CONSIDERED HIM PUNISHED BY GOD, STRICKEN BY HIM, AND AFFLICTED. BUT HE WAS PIERCED FOR OUR TRANSGRESSIONS, HE WAS CRUSHED FOR OUR INIQUITIES; THE PUNISHMENT THAT BROUGHT US PEACE WAS ON HIM, AND BY HIS WOUNDS WE ARE HEALED." ISAIAH 53:3-5
