The TNCs Web of Control: excerpt 4

the Global Workplace [3] is a network of factories, workshops, law offices, hospitals, restaurants, and all sorts of other places where goods are produced, information is processed, and services of every description are rendered - everything from cigarettes to cars contains materials from dozens of countries pieced together in a globally integrated assembly line driven by the logic of the bottom line - data processors, law offices, advertising agencies and insurance companies have become global assembly lines of a different sort - a worldwide labour market for creative merchandising ideas, computer knowledge, patient fingers, managerial know-how, and every other marketable skill co-exists with a global labour pool in which more and more of us, from the chief executive officer to the wastebasket emptier, are swimming - hundreds of millions more of the world's uprooted and dispossessed are desperate to jump in.

the Global Financial Network [4] is a constantly changing maze of currency transactions, global securities, MasterCards, euro yen swaps, and an ever more innovative array of speculative devices for repackaging and reselling money - this network is much closer to a chain of gambling casinos than to the dull gray banks of yesteryear - 24 hours a day, trillions of dollars flow through the world's major foreign-exchange markets as bits of data travelling at split-second speed - no more than 10% of this staggering sum has anything to do with trade in goods and services - international traffic in money has become an end in itself, a highly profitable game - John Maynard Keynes, who had intimations of how technology might one day be harnessed in the service of non-recreational gambling, predicted the rise of this "casino economy", as he called it - yet as banking activities have become more global and more speculative, the credit needs of billions of people and millions of small businesses are not met.

The TNCs Web of Control: excerpt 4