Down the road to isolationism!

Dear Readers:

Now that BREXIT is beginning to sink in with members of the public, a lot of people are having second thoughts about leaving the E.U. (Remember that article I did on the weekend about how Ontario did the same thing by voting in the socialist N.D.P. by mistake!)

Yes, I realize that immigration and the refugee crisis had a lot to do with it, but there is another side to this argument that bears scrutiny ....., and that is globalism and the world economy!

Just as the United States Presidential candidates are rejecting trade agreements as being a bad thing and leading to a loss of jobs among the working class, so to did a lot of the BREXIT supporters hold a myopic and provincial view of the effects of globalism on their daily lives.

To look at these effects in the U.S. and U.K. society we only need to refer to Michael Elliot.  (Raised in Liverpool, Michael Elliott is the former CEO of One, the nonprofit founded by Bono, as well as a former top editor at Time, Newsweek and the Economist.)

There is this trope that globalism only benefits the elites,” he says.

“That drives me bat shit! My parents lived very circumscribed lives and my father never traveled more than five miles from where he was born. Immigration and globalism greatly improved life for everyone in my family.”

The ark of his life, Elliott argues, and his children’s lives has been shaped and improved by globalism, which is what Brexit seems to be rejecting. “And there are tens of millions more families like us — to say nothing of the hundreds of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America for whom that is true,” he wrote on Facebook. “So can we stop this stupid crap that globalization and migration somehow only benefit the ‘elites.’”

More specifically Elliott points to two key reasons why Brexit is bad news: “First there will be economic turmoil over the short and medium term and the global economy is fragile right now. The US recovery is OK at best. I mean it’s not exactly a boom. The bottom line is when you have manufactured turmoil in the world’s fifth largest economy, it doesn’t stay limited to the UK.”

And the second reason speaks to Elliott’s deep belief in globalism. “I have always believed that the EU represents international cooperation in a world that needs more international cooperation, not less. Yes the EU isn’t perfect — and we need to have a real conversation about immigration, both in Europe and in the United States and we haven’t had that yet — but to weaken this organization that has really contributed to peace and security is irresponsible and makes me very unhappy.”

As for what happens next, Elliott says that’s actually the worst part about it. “What has been most shocking to me over the past 48 hours is that no one here knows what to do,” he says. “There was no Plan B and both political parties are in complete collapse.”

Globalism can’t be rolled back, Elliott says: “You have some guy in Mali who can Face-time his brother in Paris and say, ‘hmm, that looks pretty good, I’m going to go there.”

Figuring all this out was never going to be easy, Elliott says, but Brexit will make it that much harder.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/brexit-uk-britain-eu-michael-elliot-globalism-013148765.html#Aside