@box text intr = Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propagandist (a job which today would be called "spin doctor"), came up with a theory in the 1930s called the Big Lie: the bigger the lie you tell people, the theory went, and the more you repeat it, the more likely people are to believe it.
Goebbels might be gone but his theory is not — it's the underlying idea behind the constant, increasingly shrill, attempts by neo-liberal politicians, commentators and "experts" to convince us that corporate globalisation will raise — and, indeed, has already raised — the world's huddled masses out of poverty.
Treasurer Peter Costello had a go at perpetrating the Big Lie on July 25, telling an undoubtedly adoring audience at the right-wing think-tank, the Sydney Institute, that "ranting against globalisation is like ranting against the telephone".
"Experience shows us that open markets, trade liberalisation and the economic growth which is thereby facilitated are boosting the living standards of the world's poor", he claimed.
World Bank president James Wolfensohn, speaking in Sydney on August 1, made his own contribution to the Big Lie, arguing that globalisation was getting an unduly bad reputation when economic data indicated that about three billion people were benefitting from the process while perhaps one billion were not.
"The challenge is not to reverse globalisation", Wolfensohn said. "The challenge is to make sure that you provide the underpinnings to the people who have been disadvantaged."
Costello's and Wolfensohn's presumption is that we are all too stupid to be able to read reports, digest facts or think for ourselves. Immediately that's done, their claim about the benefits of corporate globalisation is revealed for what it is — another Big Lie.
First, the poorest of the poor, the 1.2 billion people who live on less than US$1 a day, have mostly gone backwards during the 1990s, the age of "globalisation".
Twenty-one countries (13 of them in sub-Saharan Africa), nearly all of them long-term prisoners of the structural adjustment programs designed by Wolfensohn's World Bank, have gone backwards in the United Nations Development Program's annually issued human development index.
Second, it's very easy to claim "progress" when you don't define what you mean by it (is the 0.8% economic growth experienced by the least developed countries over the last decade really "progress", when the rest of the world grew at 3.2%?).
If you define "progress" by some concrete measure, say countries' abilities to meet the UN's agreed (and very modest) 2015 goals for reducing poverty, then the majority of the world's population is slipping back. For example, according to the UNDP, 93 countries, with 62% of the world's population, won't meet the goal of reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds by 2015.
Third, there is clear evidence that economic growth has actually slowed during the era of "globalisation".
A new report, The Emperor Has No Growth, from the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that between 1980 and 2000 there was "a very clear decline in progress". The poorest countries went from a per capita GDP growth rate of 1.9% annually in the 1960-1980 period to a decline of 0.5% a year between 1980 and 2000. The middle group of countries did worse, dropping from annual growth of 3.6% to growth of just under 1% after 1980. The world's richest countries also showed a slowdown.
Fourth, it's even easier to claim "progress" if you ignore inequality within and between countries, which concentrates the "benefits" of globalisation on a very few. In China, for instance, the country where economic growth has been most rapid over the decade and on which (because of its size) most claims of "globalisation is benefitting the world's poor" are based, income inequality is rising rapidly: the richest 10% now gather in more than 12 times the income of the poorest 10%.
Worldwide, the direction is the same: according to a forthcoming study by one of Wolfensohn's own statisticians, Branko Milanovic, the richest 1% of the world's people received as much yearly income as the poorest 57%.
Fifth, even in Australia, the "benefits" of "globalisation" are highly concentrated at the top — as Costello well knows, having designed it that way.
According to a report released by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling on July 9, the wealthiest 20% of Australian adults held 62% of total wealth, while the poorest 20% held only 1%.
Sixth, the rising movement against corporate globalisation is not opposed to the telephone. It is, however, opposed to capitalism, which has ensured that, 100 years after the telephone's invention, the majority of people on this planet have never made or received a telephone call.
Then again, maybe Joseph Goebbels was full of it: no matter its size or frequency, the Big Lie certainly didn't help him for long. May the same fate will befall his latter-day imitators. We certainly hope so.