Introduction to "Criminal Justice and Globalization at the New Millennium"

FOR THE U.S. RULING CLASS AND ITS ASSORTED POLITICIANS, WALL STREET pundits, academic apologists (especially economists and political scientists), and media lackeys (including the editorial pages of The New York Times), the new millennium is cause for celebrating the apogee of the American Century. "This is no fluke," asserts Mortimer B. Zuckerman (1998: 18), chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report. "The unique American brand of entrepreneurial bottom-up capitalism is made up of structural elements that have wrought the stunning economic success of the 1990s and are likely to provide the basis for extending America's comparative advantage over.. .a Second American Century," he boasts. What Zuckerman is celebrating in "bottom-up" capitalism is the "winner-take-all" mentality, the exaggerated inequality and heightened punitiveness that forms the core of America's distinctive Character. The structural elements central to American hegemony are "free trade" and "unregulated" markets in labor, ec onomic forces that dichotomize the community of nations into extravagant winners and abject losers. Thus, although national self-determination and individual liberty are in the Constellation of American hegemonic values, they must be honored more in the breach. Astute observers point out that economic globalization is actually the reestablishment of the late- 19th-century Gilded Age enterprise, which was rudely interrupted by a 60-year backlash of isolationism and war-inflicted fragmentation of the international economy. Today, largely under the aegis of the U.S., laissez-faire globalization is hitting its stride again as a powerful economic and political doctrine. The Soviet menace has been vanquished. China has turned away from Communism as an economic doctrine. Third World resistance groups are in disarray and retreat, western European social democracies (with the bold exception of Denmark and The Netherlands) are shrinking their welfare states, and governments in Latin America, the former Soviet bloc countries, and much of Asia are busy deregulating, downsizing, privatizing, contracting out, reducing taxes, and cutting social spending. On the cultural front, people throughout the world are emulating the voracious consumerism of Americans. The ascendance of capitalist values and social standards among former peasants, apparatchiks, and state industrial workers is helping to finish off the old social orders in China, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The evidence of the social triumph of neoliberalism seems everywhere: a slightly smaller proportion of people live in dire poverty (measured as the number of people living on less than one dollar a day, stable at 1.2 billion people); global per capita income has tripled in the last 35 years; the gross domestic product (GDP) has risen in some long-stagnant regions; life expectancy has increased significantly; under five mortality is lower and adult literacy is increasing; the percentage of nations adopting liberal democracy doubled in the last 20 years, and the number of organizations concerned with human rights has expanded. Communication costs have plummeted, and the Internet promises to put people in the far reaches of the world in instant intercommunication (providing they have electricity). Yet globalization has been Janus-faced. Consider the less publicized ugly side of neoliberal globalization: disease, hunger, and poverty are intensifying for those living in countries marginalized by the global marketplace. The polarization of wealth and income has widened the gap between rich and poor countries. For those industrial countries on the winning side of the global divide, per capita consumption has risen at a steady annual rate of 2.3% over the last 25 years, and in East Asia, more than a whopping six percent annually. According to U.N. development studies, the upper fifth of those living in high-income countries account for 86% of all of the world's private expenditures on consumption. …