【正文】 workers did not bother Greenspan, or Congress and the mainstream media. The gap in ines between the 20 percent of the world39。s population in the richest and poorest countries has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 82 to 1 in 1995, and Third World conditions have in many respects worsened. Per capita ines have fallen in more than 70 countries over the past 20 years。 some 3 billion peoplehalf the world39。s population, live on under two dollars a day。 and 800 million suffer from malnutrition. In the Third World unemployment and underemployment are rampant, 3 massive poverty exists sidebyside with growing elite affluence, and 75 million people a year or more seeking asylum or employment in the North, as Third World governments allow virtually unrestricted capital flight and seek no options but to attract foreign investment. The new global order has also been characterized by increased financial volatility, and from the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s to the Mexican breakdown of 199495 to the current Asian debacle, financial crises have bee more and more threatening. With increasing privatization and deregulation, the discrepancy between the power of unregulated financial forces and that of governments and regulatory bodies increases and the potential for a global breakdown steadily enlarges. Only an elite perspective permits this record to be regarded as an economic success. Globalization as an Attack on Democracy The globalization of recent decades was never a democratic choice by the peoples of the worldthe process has been business driven, by business strategies and tactics, for business ends. Governments have helped, by incremental policy actions, and by larger actions that were often taken in secret, without national debate and discussion of where the entire process was taking the munity. In the case of some major actions advancing the globalization process, like passing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or joining the European Moary Union (EMU), publics have been subjected to massive propaganda campaigns by the interested businessmedia elites. In the United States, public opinion polls showed the general public against NAFTA even after incessant propaganda, but the mass media supported it, and it was passed. In Europe as well, polls have shown persistent majorities opposed to the introduction of the Euro, but a powerful elite supports it, so that it moves forward. This undemocratic process, carried out within a democratic facade, is consistent with the distribution of benefits and costs of globalization, and the fact that globalization has been a tool serving elite interests. Globalization has also steadily weakened democracy, partly as a result of unplanned effects, but also because the containment of labor costs and scaling down of the welfare state has required the business minority to establish firm control of the state and remove its capacity to respond to the demands of the majority. The mix of deliberate and unplanned elements in globalization39。s antidemocratic thrust can be seen in each aspect of the attack process. The assault on labor One of the main objectives of TNC movement abroad has been to tap cheaper labor sources. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states that curb unions and enter into virtual joint venture arrangements with foreign capital, as in Suharto39。s Indonesia and PRI39。s Mexico. Capital moves to 4 such friendly investment climes in an arbitrage process, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale, in a process that penalizes and thereby weakens democracy. The actual shift of capital abroad, and the use of the external option to drive hard bargains at home, has weakened labor. Labor has also been weakened by deliberate government policies of tight money and restrictive budget policies to contain inflation, at the expense of high unemployment. These policies, and the incessant focus on labor market flexibility as the solution to the unemployment problem, reflect a corporate and antilabor policy agenda, fully institutionalized. There have even been more open and direct attacks on organized laborboth Reagan and Thatcher engaged in union busting, and the latter was quite explicit in her aim to weaken labor as a political force. Democracy, according to pluralistic theory, is said to rest on the existence of intermediate groups, like labor organizations, that can bargain and work on behalf of an otherwise atomized population. The deliberate weakening of such groups is thus an attack on democracy. The ideological campaign In the United States, Britain, Canada, and other countries the business munity has also mounted a sustained ideological campaign to make their preferred policies part of mon understanding. These campaigns have proceeded in parallel with globalization and have been remarkably similar, reflecting the global flow of ideology and overlapping sources of funding. The favored neoliberal ideology pushes the idea that the market can do it all, that government is a burden and threat, and that deregulation and privatization are inherently good and inevitable. It