Evolving free city states of Europe had no resources (wool, hides, timber, etc.) from which to manufacture consumer products.

Those resources were purchased from the countryside, processed into consumer products, and a share sold back to the countryside to pay for those resources.

When the serfs from the outlying villages saw the simple looms, vats, and other primitive industrial capital to manufacture those products, they promptly returned to their villages and built their own industrial capital. The result was loss of wealth to the city or even starvation.

To survive, those cities had to control the resources and trade of their "countryside." Throughout the Middle Ages, raiding parties from the cities raided the countryside, destroyed their primitive industrial capital or carried it back to the city.

The innate comparative advantages of the outlying villages were eliminated by force to maintain their dependency and lay claim to the wealth of the countryside.

One city would become more efficient and more powerful than another city and engage in a struggle to take over the markets and resources of the other city’s countryside. The besieged city faced a loss of wealth or even starvation. So city states fought city states. Imperial city states evolved into nations which continued to fight over the source of their wealth, control of resources and trade.

Imperial nations of Europe colonised the world and continued to battle over who would control the wealth producing process, processing the natural wealth of, and controlling the trade of, their "countryside."

The imperial nations broke themselves battling over the world’s wealth in 20th century world wars and no longer had the power to keep the world under their control.

The colonised world, the countryside of the former imperial nations, started breaking free. The only state left to suppress those breaks for freedom was the United States. America took on the job of keeping the world from becoming free and prevent the loss of their cheap resources. America did that job well.

Over the centuries, victors continually encoded their excessive rights into law, a process ongoing  today, through instruments like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), its successor the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of course the World Bank and a bogus "war on terrorism" (by terrorist states).

The ex-Imperial nations of Europe consume roughly 14 times as much resources as lie within their borders. The ratios in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan is far greater. America, with just over 4 percent of the world’s people, consumes 28 percent of the world’s resources.

In short, the basics of world trade today is identical to the basics of world trade 1,000 years ago when European society evolved from "plunder by raids" to "plunder by trades."

American and proxy military forces are in about a hundred countries today for the same purpose as those raiding parties from the imperial cities of Europe in the Middle Ages invaded their 'countryside' areas, to control resources, control technology (monopolise industrial technology) and effectively control markets.

Therefore, the emergence of conscientious leaders in powerful nations with a sincere interest in the well being of societies other than their own local one, is a rare occurrence. Leaders care for their own, even as millions or even billions of other people are impoverished by their "grand strategies" (financial, economic, legal, and military), "realpolitik," "containment," "economic warfare".

Twentieth century military power, financial warfare, and contrived patent and trading laws diminish the comparative power of the resource-wealthy world today. The impoverished but resource wealthy world is the countryside for today’s imperial centres of capital. The power struggles between city-states had intrigues, alliances, balance-of-power, and foreign policies were identical to those of modern nations and empires. The destruction of another society’s capital to protect markets substituted "plunder by raids" with "plunder by trade."

Instead of appropriating another’s wealth directly, societies learned to accomplish this through making others dependent and siphoning off their wealth through unequal trades protected in the last resort by military oppression as recently practiced in the pipeline wars of Southern Europe, Georgia and Afghanistan and in the ongoing murderous invasion of Iraq for the purpose of keeping obese bottoms driving around in cheaply operated gas guzzlers.

The powerful have learned to effectively plunder by trade with expensive military back up as last resort, and their 'consumer' driven economies have become dependent on artificially distorted markets. Once contrived unequal trade regimes are in place, restructuring towards equal trade and free markets, would mean severing arteries which feed the constantly rising standard of living enjoyed by the dominant society - and collapse of those living standards would almost certainly trigger revolt by populations among whom  gluttonous consumerism has been cultivated in recent decades by their governments.

^ Back to top