Government
Governance at the federal level — US, Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, name it — is failing across the planet. Some thought China, in their decades dash to industrialization, found the governing grail, but there was nothing sacred about it. Industrialization and centralized governance always went hand in hand, whether in the US, Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and every other nation that experienced industrialization.
Banks and corporations, not governance, were the great political/social innovations of industrialism. Government itself changed little under industrialism. Political power largely came to undemocratically rest in the new corporate structures.
However, unbeknownst to most, this model had met its limits before the Chinese experience, especially in regards to industrialism's massive and largely ignored environmental consequences. These environmental challenges have recently pushed themselves into the limelight, mass marketed rather unenlightenedly as “Climate Change.”
Along with growing environmental concerns, a crude understanding developed that we all as a species, along with all other species, share this relatively small planet. Over the last century, war and atomic technology brought about, for the first time in human history, a perceived necessity for some sort of global governance. Yet, initial attempts were weak, unknowingly designed to fail as institutional anachronisms, corrupted by the most powerful, who, as always, sought to bend them to their own will, and if incapable of that, make them impotent.
All of which gets to a very amusing piece in today's FT about corporations complaining about EU attempts at global governance in regards to “Climate.”
The FT writes,
“The directive introduces mandatory audited corporate reporting on a vast range of environmental, social and governance impacts including greenhouse gas emissions and internal risks and controls.”
“The extraterritoriality is bonkers,” a policy expert at a large (banking) US institution told the Financial Times.”
One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about anonymous comments from bankers complaining about “extraterritoriality.” For past century, bankers wrote the laws on extraterritoriality.
The FT continues,
“They privately admit that the “ship has sailed” on the extraterritoriality, even if they are at odds with the greater European project of creating debt and equity markets as broad and deep as those in the US.
“You’re going to kill off European capital markets like this,” the policy expert says.
Phew, you'd thinking killing off capital markets was a bad thing.
Funnily enough, I have sympathy for the complaints, but for different reasons. The greater problem is as the idea of this small planet and its fragile environment emerged over the last seventy-five years, the immediate response was greater centralized government, and make no mistake, this centralizing has had overwhelming corporate support.
These approaches are nonstarters. Taking already structures, institutions and processes and making them continental and global, well that ain't going to work for anyone.
Regarding the same topic, the FT has another piece on the Fed exporting inflation: “Soaring fertiliser prices deepen Africa’s food crisis.” Certainly in the year 2022, no existing federal institution screams failure louder than the Fed.
However, the article cuts deeper than money, reporting,
“Evans Luvaga, a maize farmer in Bungoma, western Kenya, has been hit hard by rapidly rising fertiliser prices.”
“Previously, we used to get inputs at affordable prices, especially fertiliser, but since the Ukraine war fertiliser has doubled in price,” he said.
“Luvaga usually cultivates eight acres of land, but this season has cut down his planted area by half due to the higher costs. “Farmers cannot afford it, that is the reason why the cost of maize production has gone up. And now there is a scarcity of maize, which is a major food crop here.”
“The price of nitrogen based fertilisers, which use gas as feedstock and typically provide for up to two-thirds of the nutrients used to grow crops, has risen in line with natural gas prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They hit record highs after sanctions on Moscow, a key source of natural gas to Europe which accounts for about 15 per cent of global crop nutrient supplies, reduced their availability.”
With-out-a-doubt, absolutely nothing more bloodily and corruptly exemplifies the failure of extra-national institutions, such as the EU, NATO, and the UN, than the ongoing criminal idiocy of the Ukraine war.
The challenges humanity face in the 21st century – technological, economic, environmental, war and peace – are only going to be met with new ways of understanding and instituting government. All government reform starts with corporate reform. These are not additional steps, they are fundamental first steps.