Wow, this column by William Greider is on the mark, and asks insightful and relevant questions that are going unposed in the mainstream media. You passionate conservatives that attacked Clinton for cozy China relations ignore facts regarding your right wing leadership enabling and supporting Boeing to move airplane construction to China and Citibank to launder money for wealthy autocrats.

A recent New York Times headline asked an insinuating question: "After the Attacks, Which Side Is the Left On?" The Times should find the nerve to put the same question to the major players of business and finance. Which side is Citigroup on? Or General Electric and Boeing? Where does loyalty reside for those American corporations that have rebranded themselves as "global firms"? Our resurgence of deeply felt patriotism, with official assurances that Americans are all-in-this-together, raises the same question. At a deeper level, the patriotic sense of unity collides with familiar assumptions advanced by the architects and cheerleaders of corporate globalization. The nation-state has been eclipsed, they explain, and no longer has the power to determine its own destiny. The national interest, they assert, now lies in making the world safe for globalizing commerce and capital.

In these threatening times, such claims sound suddenly unpersuasive. Frightened citizens turn naturally to their government for security--the original purpose of the nation-state--and business enterprises do the same. The global corporation, however, intends to have it both ways: American first when that serves its interest, but otherwise aloof from mere nationality. Since these companies are busy waving the flag at the moment, one needs to recall how they described themselves during the past decade, as they dispersed production worldwide and planted their logos in many distant lands. "The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources," a Colgate-Palmolive executive once explained. "There is no mindset that puts this country first."

The much-admired CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, portrayed GE as a "borderless company," and he brutally enforced the logic. When GE wanted additional cost savings on turbines, jet engines and appliances, it told its US suppliers to pick up and leave, or else--that is, move the jobs to Mexico or other locales where the labor is much cheaper, or GE would find different suppliers. A GE executive in Taiwan once remarked, "The US trade deficit is not the most important thing in my life...running an effective business is."

Everyone should read this paragraph here twice and ponder it ...

The patriotic tensions generated by war and recession can spawn a rare clarifying moment--the political opportunity to educate and agitate Americans on these deeper contradictions in power between the nation-state and the global system. Inattentive citizens are no longer so passive, but suddenly paying attention to world news. The Seattle movement, as Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange observed, has a potential to connect with a much broader audience, now ready to listen and learn. The teach-in curriculum should begin closer to home, not for narrow nationalistic purposes or to stop globalization but to build support for fundamental change in how globalization proceeds. If the global system is to be reformed--made more humane and democratic, more equitable and respectful of each society's values--the power to achieve those goals belongs only to national governments, not to remote international institutions. For obvious reasons, that power resides especially in the politics of Washington, DC.