America’s led global trade and Federal Reserve policies have failed America and capitalism worldwide.
The deepening divide in America and across the globe must be bridged if America and humanity are to survive the 21st-century. The world’s free-trade world economies retreated from openness between 1914 and 1950. They are doing so again because globalization has created bigger gaps between the average incomes of the rich and poor nations than ever before. Today, unlike the early decades of the 20th-century, billions of people worldwide have access to the Internet and have mobile devices. Our age of instant communication has made the world aware of the widening cavernous gap between hopeless poverty and abundant wealth. Knowledge has become a threat to global economic and political stability and to established career politicians and their entrenched financial backers. Understanding each other as Americans and working together to foster an economic balance and cultural balance, while developing a closer relationship with China will only protect and enhance all of humanity.
The clarion warning of Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” applies not only to America today, but the world. To stop the ongoing divides from increasing and start to bridge the gap, we have to rationalize local and interlocal aspirations – not imperial fiats by career politicians, bureaucrats and central bank managers. None of them have ever created the capitalist wealth they know how to talk about and do nothing about.
Interlocalism is a phrase I coined in my book Custom Maid Knowledge for New World Disorder. Interlocalism is the proposed interaction between different local communities promoting their collective well-being with minimum government participation. The concentric circles start with the local village, town or city and expand over the county, country, and compatible global communities. It is the fusion of local strengths spread widely over similar minded and compatible people. From the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, California, Mexico, the Americas, Philippines, Scotland, India, Ireland, Israel, Korea and China.
Globalization died in the last decade of the 20th-century. It was a 19th-century model of economics based on scarcity, but the whole world was in surplus. The debates on globalization, secession or separatism must therefore be replaced with an all-encompassing discussion on inter-localism. Interlocalism will accelerate as the economic benefits and natural growth become evident in the 21st-century.
Interlocalism is adaptation and expansion of the industrial concept of “clusters.” Compatible communities competing and collaborating in a network of mutually supportive, global-wired urban hubs that recognize and accept that economics – fueled by the natural resources that empires, countries, communities, tribes and villages have gone to war over – are, and always have been, the underlying engine of the locomotive of politics and senseless wars.
The Federal Reserve, like Globalization, is a relic of the 20th-century. The Federal Reserve Board system was set up in 1913. It is made up of 12 regional districts. Eleven districts are on the East Coast or Midwest. The only Fed bank on the West Coast is in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles or San Diego, that together are one of the largest trade portals in the world — and were the epicenter of the subprime mortgage meltdown.
The San Francisco Fed covers the diversity of oil-dependent Alaska, tech-savvy Seattle and Silicon Valley, Hollywood, defense contractors, agro-business – and even American Samoa and Guam.
Any wonder the Fed’s forecasts failed to predict the Great Recession of 2008, dot-com crash of 2000 and the credit crunch of the ‘90s? Fed failures imperil the U.S. economy and the concept that free markets improve peoples’ lives.
The Fed Board system has to redraw its map to represent modern day commercial realities and revise its economic models to incorporate big data, new crypto- currencies and the gig and gigabyte economies.
Global trade and finance are interconnected in the 21st-century world and are long overdue for an interlocal fix for the Post-Global Interlocal Sino-American Century.