Speed up! There's a cliff coming!

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks that the cure for the ills of globalization is more globalization.

Government policymakers should work to make sure the benefits of economic globalization are widely enjoyed to maintain political support for trade growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said today.

Political and technological changes are likely to keep spurring global economic integration -- the growing exchange of goods, capital, workers and ideas around the world, he said in a speech to a conference here.

That trend creates the potential for raising living standards and lowering poverty, but also the likelihood of resistance by groups or nations that feel threatened by change, Bernanke told a gathering of central bankers, analysts and academics.

"The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration are sufficiently widely shared," Bernanke said. "The effort is well worth making, as the potential benefits of increased global economic integration are large indeed."

Bernanke did not propose specific policies for countering efforts to restrict trade, but he suggested as one general example the efforts to provide job training to workers who have lost work because of globalization.

Globalization has been going on for decades, and has a practically unbroken record of lowering living standards and increasing poverty--except among the ruling class to which Bernanke belongs. When he wants to ensure that the benefits are "sufficiently widely shared," he means that the leaders of third-world nations are sufficiently bought off with money and weapons that they will keep the cost of their labor and resources low so that Ben and his buddies can continue to make exhorbitant profits from them.

Peak oil will likely thwart many of Ben's grand schemes, as the race to the bottom runs out of fuel. But the whole idea of searching the globe for the cheapest labor and lowest environmental standards, all to increase quarterly profits, is disgusting, as is the idea that jackasses in Washington should be calling the shots for the whole world. It never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to think that so-called globalization is "progress."